In Media Res
by AureliaAndMidnight
Summary: Dimension Travel AU. Harry Potter jumped in front of Bellatrix's curse and was the one pushed into the Veil, not Sirius, in fifth year. Dumbledore needed a Chosen One, so he summoned one from...elsewhere. Only, a few others hopped on for the ride. This is the story of the Second Blood War. D/Hr with more pairings to come. Also, massively AU.
1. Albus Dumbledore's Exhaustion

**Albus Dumbledore's Exhaustion**

Albus Dumbledore, now over a century old and hopefully the wiser for it, sat slumped at his desk. The normal whistle and tinkle of the bric-a-brac that littered his office had been silenced by a wave of his knobby wand, held by equally knobby fingers. The war was taking its toll on the supposed Leader of the Light, and one could see it in the curve of his back and the heaviness that seemed to weigh on the headmaster's shoulders. His eyes were closed, as if he couldn't bear to look at the world anymore.

He leaned his forehead on his hand and let out a long sigh at the book in front of him. The pages were yellowed and dusty, like all properly magical tomes were, and the words were written in a musical sort of English. They offered him no comfort, but they did offer him something else. A solution. A prayer. A glimmer of hope in an ever-darkening situation.

Dumbledore's Chosen One was dead, the prophecy fulfilled in the worst possible way, and he was out of time. Out of options.

With another long sigh, he opened his eyes—devoid of their usual twinkle—pushed back his half-moon glasses, and flipped the book closed. Fawkes chirped sadly from his perch and the Sorting Hat let out a gusty laugh. "You're gonna do it, then, Albus?" the hat wheezed.

"Do I have a choice?" the man asked tiredly.

The portrait of Phineas Nigellus on the wall snorted. "You always have a choice," he pointed out dryly.

"Between what is right—" continued Dilys Derwent, a strange smile on her wrinkled face.

"And what is easy," finished Brian Gagwilde, who almost never spoke.

Albus stood from his chair with an air of terrible foreboding and made his way to the stairs. He swished his wand. " _Expecto Patronum_ ," he intoned, and a silvery phoenix that could have been Fawkes' twin flashed into existence. "Kingsley Shacklebolt," he told it, and the creature nodded. "Summon the Order," Albus said then, "I have made a breakthrough."

The phoenix dove through the open window of Albus' office and into the darkening sky. Albus gripped the stair banister as he watched it leave, before slowly making his way down the stairs. He would inform Minerva at the meeting, he decided.

The aging headmaster walked into the Great Hall slowly and laboriously, and looked over the assembled crowd. There were students there at the tables, a sea of red and yellow. Blue was scattered sporadically through the room—many Ravenclaws had seen the writing on the wall and had withdrawn from Hogwarts. There were almost no students in green at all but for a few first-years whose families couldn't protect them, the two or three half-blood Slytherins, and four upper-year students. Daphne Greengrass sat primly at the table, her sister Astoria's spine ramrod straight next to her. Why the Greengrasses had thrown their lot in with the Light, he would never know. He had only received a curt note, asking if he would please look after Daphne and Astoria and keep them out of trouble? It was signed with Hyperion Greengrass' signature and stamped with his signet ring.

Pansy Parkinson sat with a terrifyingly cool visage, surrounded by space on all sides. No one would sit next to her. Dumbledore did not know why that one chose to stay, either. She certainly would have been safer with her traditionally Dark family. And Damon Gosforth, who was pure enough for Voldemort but remained at Hogwarts because, as Dumbledore had heard him say in the halls once, "I won't fight for someone who would have my cousin killed."

His cousin, as it turned out, was a Squib.

There were a few Slytherin alumni in the crowd as well. He spotted Marcus Flint sitting shoulder to shoulder with Oliver Wood—he had not seen that coming, but apparently Minerva had. She had giggled like a schoolgirl when Flint had barged into Hogwarts, the first day of the school year, with a snarl on his face demanding to see Oliver. "I know he's here," he had shouted. "You bloody well let me see him because I'm not letting that fool die without me."

Oliver had stumbled out of the Great Hall with a hopeful smile. "Flint?" he had asked, almost disbelieving. "You told me you wouldn't come."

"I went spare without you around," Flint said gruffly, and Oliver has taken his hand and dragged him back into the hall.

Dumbledore remembered lifting an eyebrow at his Transfiguration professor. Her lips had twitched into a strange sort of smirk before she giggled. Just once was all she could manage in the bleak mess their lives had become, but a laugh nonetheless. "Caught them in the broom closet on the fifth floor, you know the one," she confided, and left the entryway with her step a little lighter.

Dumbledore surveyed the Great Hall once more, burning each face into his mind so that if they died— _when_ they died, he thought miserably—someone would remember them.

There were too many gaps in the crowd, like a mouth of missing teeth. He could feel himself slipping every time he saw James Potter and Lily Evans in the hallways, every time he spotted the Longbottoms or Marlene Mckinnon or Edgar Bones. He would catch a glimpse of the Weasley red hair and mistake them for a different set of twins.

 _Not now_ , he told himself. _When it's all over._

He left the Great Hall quickly and climbed the tower steps to the Room of Requirement, each step feeling heavier than the last. He paced before the wall, wishing for a place to do what needed to be done.

The Room looked like a combination or a war council and a summoning circle, with a heavy wooden table on the right and a large open space on the left, a crate of candles and chalk lying to the side. Albus slumped into the chair at the head of the table and waited.

Sirius Black was the first to arrive, his barely concealed fury wrapped around him like a cloak. The man's rage and grief had not abated since his godson's death—if anything, it grew. The man's expression was thunderous.

Severus Snape walked in next and sat as far away from Sirius as possible. He blamed the former Death Eater, Albus knew, and Severus was rational enough to realize that now was not the time to come to blows.

Molly and Arthur came in then, their sons and daughter behind them. Percy was missing, having seemingly caved to the regime. Only they knew that Percy was a spy, sending them information about Voldemort's Knights of the Walpurgis—his new army. Charlie was missing too, off in Romania trying to drum up foreign aid. They all pretended the cavalry would come soon when they knew it was a lost cause, since Molly prefered her son out of Voldemort's reach anyway.

Over the next few minutes, the remaining Order members streamed in. Tonks and Remus came in, holding hands, and Mad-Eye followed behind them grumbling about how terrible this set-up was, didn't Albus know they could all get cursed in the back this way?

When they were all finally assembled around the table, Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood arriving last, Dumbledore tapped his fingers on the table. "I have found a solution," he said quietly. Neville sat bolt upright and leaned toward him. "A solution?" the boy asked, his eyes shining for the first time in a long while.

"Not a pretty one, but a solution nonetheless," Albus confirmed, and Minerva visibly relaxed in her chair. "Brilliant," Ginny said, smiling slightly. Albus felt the weight of their expectations, of their hope, and felt infinitely more weary. Only Sirius and Severus sat unmoving, their faces unchanged.

"As we all know, the prophecy was fulfilled," he said. Molly pressed her lips together and Arthur tightened his hold on her hand. "And none of us can kill him because of it. Only—" he paused for a moment. "Only Harry can kill him."

"Harry's dead," Sirius snarled. Remus tried to place a comforting hand on his friend's shoulder, but Sirius shrugged it off.

"Here, yes," Albus agreed. "But not elsewhere."

"Stop being cryptic, you old coot," Alastor said, tapping his peg leg impatiently.

Albus nodded. "I found a ritual," he told them, his Order. "That can summon people across timelines and dimensions."

"It sounds Dark," Tonks objected.

The headmaster seemed to slump further. "It is," he said. "We would be stripping a man from his home and bringing him here to fight our war. It is abhorrent, and will only work if his counterpart here is dead."

Sirius got up abruptly, the chair rocking back and forth, and left. Remus made as if to follow him, but Tonks reached for him, her hand trembling, so he stayed.

Albus looked at the broken man as he left and felt an abyss of guilt open up inside of him. "But it is the only solution we have left," he told them.

"We have no choice," Alastor agreed, and the words of the portraits echoed in Albus' mind. _But this is war_ , he reminded himself. Hogwarts was the last bastion of freedom in Wizarding Britain, and Voldemort was growing bolder. Soon, he'd attack the muggles, and then they would all be doomed. He could not let that happen.

"The ritual requires seven people," Albus informed them. Ginny, Luna, and Neville immediately jumped to their feet. "We'll do it, Professor," Ginny said firmly, but he shook his head. "Wizards of age," he amended. Ginny and Luna remained standing for a moment longer, wavering with indecision, before slumping back down. Neville sat with a muscle ticking in his jaw. _Too young,_ Albus thought regretfully.

Molly Weasley stood then, the skin around her mouth white. "I'll do it," she whispered. Remus and Tonks rose to their feet, followed quickly by Minerva McGonagall. To everyone's surprise but his, Severus Snape stood as well.

Alastor let a breath. "I'll get Black," he said quietly, and hobbled out of the room. He returned to a silent room a few minutes later, alone.

"He won't do it," he said to the Order. "Won't participate in dragging someone who isn't his Harry to a dimension as, I quote, 'Fucked up as this one.' He wants no part in this, Albus."

Albus seemed to slump further in on himself. He had suspected Sirius would disapprove, but had hoped that maybe the man would see sense for once in his life. But the man's loyalty—and pride—ran too strong for that. Damn that Black stubbornness. He had seen it in generations of Blacks, from Cygnus and Walburga to Narcissa and Regulus. And there was not a thing he could do about it.

"I'll do it, then," came a voice who had not yet spoken. George Weasley had gotten to his feet, his face unsmiling.

When Fred had died two months earlier, George has become an entirely different person. Sometimes he would pause during conversations, sometimes midway through a sentence, as if waiting for his twin to jump into the verbal tennis match. Sometimes he would stumble to the side, as if he had attempted to lean on somebody who wasn't there. And all too often he would cut himself off before speaking or make some strange aborted movement, as if he wasn't used to making the first move.

Albus could not remember the last time George Weasley had laughed. His volunteering wasn't entirely unexpected, however. The boy—man, now, really—had been champing at the bit to do _something_ in their fight against Voldemort.

So he nodded to George, saying, "I will get the lines you need to say for ritual by tomorrow. We'll perform it on the new moon."

"Meeting adjourned," said Tonks, a wry smile twisting her tired face. The Order trickled out of the Room of Requirement, some pausing to look back at Dumbledore, at the ritual space, or at the table they had all sat at.

Dumbledore waited until they had all left before conjuring a piece of white chalk and beginning to sketch out a seven pointed star. "The mother," he muttered, then moving to the next. "The brother…"

And so it went, until he had sketched runes all around the star. He tucked the chalk into a pocket of his uncharacteristically somber robe and left the room, trusting Rowena Ravenclaw's invention to keep his ritual circle locked from prying eyes. He wondered if he were doing the right thing. Nowadays, Dumbledore was far more cautious when toying with the lives of his followers. It had taken the very worst situation to get the old man to change his ways, to think a little bit more before considering people as pawns. Because they were people first, he knew, and soldiers second, but for decades he thought he had forgotten that. But in this radically different world, where the Ministry was run by Lucius Malfoy and Voldemort was securing the borders of Magical Britain with his new army, there was no room for mistakes. He was Albus Dumbledore, leader of the last line of defense in Britain, and he would not let people down again.

 **A/N So, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year...this is what happened. Yes, this fic is inspired by Kayly Silverstorm's Stages of Hope, but hopefully the only similarity will be the tone and dimension-travel AU aspect, because the plot I have the vague idea for is quite different. There's an itty-bitty reference to one of Shayalonnie's fics, can you find it?**


	2. George Weasley's Grief

**George Weasley's Grief**

George walked back to his room up in Gryffindor Tower—not his dorm room, he couldn't bear to live there anymore and besides, he had technically dropped out—with a heaviness in his step. He wondered if he were doing the right thing, because a part of him agreed with Sirius. To drag someone into a different world to fight a battle they hadn't asked for was a terrible thing to do. Maybe even unforgivable. But that part of him, the part that questioned the morality of swelling up Dudley Dursley's tongue for a lark or testing products on firsties, had quieted since Fred had died.

 _Don't think about that,_ he told himself. _Don't think about that._ He was so absorbed in his thoughts he didn't notice Daphne Greengrass, the snake, passing him in the corridor.

But telling himself to think about it was like telling someone not to think of a purple elephant—it just made him think about it more. _Fred would've appreciated the comparison,_ George thought wryly, then dug the blunt fingernails of his hand into his palm. The absence of his twin felt like a gaping wound in his side. Everything reminded him of Fred.

Sometimes he would look out of one of the windows in the tower and wonder what it would feel like to jump out of it. Would his stomach drop to his feet? Does the wind when in free-fall feel like the wind during Quidditch? Would anybody see him go? But the thought would leave as quickly as it came, because Fred would have never wanted him to. George had something to fight for, too— _people_ to fight for. He couldn't imagine what it would do to his mother if both of them were gone.

And, God, what kind of a brother would he be if he didn't avenge Fred, didn't avenge _Harry,_ who had been his brother in all but name? Didn't avenge _Ron,_ the little brother he had picked on for years but would have done anything for?

Harry had died in the Department of Mysteries, pushed through the Veil by a spell meant for Sirius. He had heard the story of Harry's death from Luna, teased it out of her in short snippets on the days when the rain didn't seem to end. "It was Bellatrix," she had said in her high, dreamy voice. "She shot a red spell at Sirius and Harry shoved him out of the way like one of those heroes from storybooks. But it pushed him through the Veil…"

"And then?" George asked, desperate for more details.

Luna, who had been on her tiptoes trying to reach for a book, dropped back onto her heels. "Ron yelled something," she said. "I don't remember what he said, it's all a blur."

"Try to remember, Luna, please," he begged.

Luna looked at him once, searching his eyes for something. She found it, he supposed, because she nodded and continued. "It sounded a bit like a broken 'no', to be honest." She noticed the stricken look on his face and winced slightly. "I'm sorry if I sound cold," she said then. "I'm trying to dissociate right now and I'm not very good at it. Otherwise, I might start crying and then you'll never know what happened."

George flinched slightly. "I'm sorry." What was he doing, making the poor girl relive that terrible night?

Luna smiled wanly. "I know." She went back on her tiptoes, scanning the book titles. "He ran at Bellatrix Lestrange, his wand out...there was a brain clutching at his arm, lashing it to his side. He was all groggy and confused and his voice was all raw from screaming."

George listened raptly, horrified but feeling the need to know all of it. He needed to know.

"She laughed," Luna said. "She laughed and it was terrible, and she Crucio-d him right there and then. It must've been that last spell that killed him, already dying from the brains. Hermione was screaming too." She chanced a look at George again before quickly looking away, her blonde ponytail swinging. "One of the Death Eaters grabbed her and in the chaos after, we lost her."

"So she's dead, then," George choked, the tears making a lump in his throat. He hadn't known Hermione well, really, but she was just a kid. Ron was just a kid, Harry was just a kid. And so was Luna, standing there in all her 14 and a half glory.

Luna shrugged, then added ominously, "Or worse."

And then Fred had died, and his world, which he had been putting back together with paste and willpower, crumbled again.

Two months after the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, Voldemort and his followers had attacked Hogsmeade. It was just a raid, just Voldemort giving Dumbledore the bird and causing some more chaos, but the Order wouldn't stand for it.

Kingsley's lynx had bounded into the Order meeting in Dumbledore's office. In his deep, commanding voice, it said, "Death Eaters at Hogsmeade. Send help, and quickly!"

George remembered the way the headmaster had stood so quickly he knocked over his chair. All of the members of age had reached for him, touching his robe as Fawkes flew to him. Fred, with that cocky, familiar grin, had grabbed George's hand and then onto his mother's robe. They were flashed to a scene straight out of a nightmare. Houses were on fire and Death Eaters ran through the streets, cursing civilians with impunity. George saw, briefly, what looked like Madam Rosmerta and Aberforth Dumbledore standing back to back and dueling three masked men at once.

"FRED!" Molly Weasley had yelled, "GEORGE! What—"

"We can help," Fred had said firmly.

"You're not of age," she tried, but his twin had already run into the fray with all the impulsiveness of the older brother and all the false invincibility of someone on the cusp of adulthood.

George remembered that Fred led them both into Honeydukes, which had smoke billowing out of the door. "Come on!" he yelled, and grasped his brother's hand. He could hear screaming coming from the floor above and took the stairs two at a time. They burst through the hallway door to see a Death Eater standing over a woman, her body twitching from what George guessed must have been a Cruciatus. "Stupefy!" Fred yelled, throwing his wand arm out like he held a sword. The Death Eater dodged to the left, the white mask glinting eerily in the flames from outside.

"Protego," George muttered, the blue shield flickering into existence to cover Fred's unprotected side. His entire body was stiff with adrenaline and nerves.

"Blood-traitors," the Death Eater grunted, and laughed. He circled them, forcing them to move until his back was to the destroyed hallway and theirs were to the window.

Fred's eyes flickered to the woman on the floor and the Death Eater took his chance. "Bombarda!" he yelled, and George's eyes widened fractionally as he sent more magic into his shield spell. But the Blasting Curse was meant for the wall, which exploded in a cloud of splinters and plaster. Suddenly George was falling back, Fred beside him, into open air. Fred yelled something unintelligible.

"Spongify!" George roared, pointing his wand at the ground. The two of them bounced ten feet into the air before landing again.

"Thanks, brother," Fred said, shooting George a grin. He sent one of his own back and looked up. The Death Eater was nowhere to be seen, having disappeared into the smoke.

"On to the next one, then?" George remarked, breathing hard.

"You read my mind."

The two of them ran into two more Death Eaters soon after and began dueling in the middle of Hogsmeade Square. The two of them stood back to back, with George playing defense and Fred shooting off offensive spells. Strengthen shield, drop for Fred's attacks, grab debris to block an Avada, and over again. But George felt himself tiring and knew Fred was, too. So when he next dropped the shield he shot off an offensive spell of his own. "Diffindo!" George yelled, aiming at the taller Death Eater.

The man was taken by surprise and reeled backwards, bright crimson blood dripping from his wand arm. He swore at him and made a move as if to cast, but Fred saw how the female Death Eater next to him glanced quickly at the wound and took the opportunity. "Levicorpus!" Fred shouted, and the woman was yanked up by her ankle into the air. George Stunned the woman and Fred let her drop to the ground. The man had recovered to cast more spells, but the spells were sloppier now, his movements looser.

"We got him!" Fred said, his smile spreading across his sooty face. He let out a gleeful laugh.

"Yeah?" the man growled. He planted his feet and swept his wand in a strange outward motion and George hesitated.

"Fluctus Inpulsa!" the Death Eater screamed, and the resulting shockwave hit their shield and shattered it in a starburst of blue light, smacking George like a blow to the chest. But that was nothing compared to how the spell hit Fred, who had unconsciously gotten in front of his twin. George would never forget the sound of three of Fred's ribs cracking.

"Fred!" George yelled, and cast out with his wand blindly. He wasn't sure what he did but the knockback of the spell pushed the Death Eater to the ground.

He needed to finish this, needed to get his twin help, so he cast the first spell that came to mind with a slash of his arm. Luna's words came back to him. "Sectumsempra!"

When the Death Eater's chest opened up in a spray of red George barely felt anything, watching dispassionately as he slumped to the ground. Right now, he needed to focus on his brother. He dropped to his knees and wracked his brain for the Diagnostic Spells he had seen Madam Pomfrey cast. "C'mon, c'mon, stay with me, Fred," he begged, seeing his twin's eyelids flickering. "Hurts," he groaned, a tried to bring a hand to his side. "You'll be fine," George promised, speed-reading the words that floated in front of him. "Three broken ribs and—" he cursed. He could keep Fred's ribs from moving around but he had no idea how to fix internal bleeding.

Fred coughed and blood came up from his lips, dripping onto his blue sweater. "Must've punctured a lung." He tried to smile but couched again.

George cast a Patronus, the coyote bounding from his wand. "Get Madame Pomfrey, anybody!" he told it. "Get Mum, even! Tell them Fred's bleeding out and I don't know what to do—"

He cut himself off, eyes widening. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the antidote to Nosebleed Nougat. "Please work," he mumbled, "Please work." They had designed it to slow down excessive bleeding but it was still in its early testing stages, far too early for consistency or even efficiency.

Fred swallowed it down with difficulty and George crossed his fingers, casting another diagnostic. "Please, please, please," he breathed, watching the words and numbers floating faintly in the smoke. He cursed and emptied out his pockets, looking for another antidote, but there were none left.

"S'okay, George," Fred whispered, his white fingers clutching George's left hand. "S'okay. Tell them I love them, yeah?" He smiled weakly. "Love you."

George didn't even blink. "Love you too," he said.

Later, when the Death Eaters had fled and the smoke was cleared, when the clean-up had begun, Madame Pomfrey rushed over to George saying "I just got your Patronus, dearie." He looked up at her from where he knelt on the ground, gripping Fred's hand like a lifeline— _ha, ha_ —and still, he didn't blink.

Madame Pomfrey's startled "Oh," would echo in his mind for hours after. He remembered Mum rushing over, remembered seeing her face fall into lines of grief and pain. He remembered standing, covered in dust and soot and blood— _Fred's_ —and stumbling away from the scene and up the path to Hogwarts. George walked the entire way, trusting his mother to take care of Fred's body.

Tonks had approached him afterward and passed him a single piece of parchment. She wasn't smiling either.

George unfolded the scrap and read the name inside. "Travers," he said aloud in the empty corridor. "Travers."

And he kept walking.

George remembered seeing Fred's casket being lowered into the ground at the Weasley family plot and cringing inside. _He wouldn't have wanted that,_ George thought numbly, and recalled a conversation they had had years ago when they were both firsties.

"I don't think I ever want to get buried," Fred said, leaning back onto the couch in the Gryffindor common room. "All that dirt and dead things surrounding me. No thanks."

George laughed. "Y'know, I'd be dead too, Gred. I wonder how big the coffin'd have to be for the both of us?" Because then, it seemed inconceivable that one of them would die before the other.

"Nah," Fred decided. "Someone'll put our ashes in a Zonko's firework and we can go whistling across the night sky."

"That's deep," George said, snickering. His twin's face adopted a horrified expression. "Reckon I'm turning into Percy, then? He's always reciting poetry and things."

"Cor, now that's a fate worse than death."

They had laughed together, sitting lazily in the common room, but George forcibly pulled himself out of the memory. He didn't want to think about that. But he still had to say something, didn't he?"

They called him up and he stood there with his hands in the pockets of his robes. "Fred—" his voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried to speak around the press of tears in his throat. "Fred was the best," George said. He wondered how he would condense all that was his brother into words.

"He was my other half. They say your spouses are your better half, right?" He tried to smile but his face wouldn't twist the same way it used to. "Fred was my better half. I'm not sure what I'm doing here without him."

He coughed. He told himself not to cry, not here, not now.

"Fred was a firework whistling across the night sky," he said hoarsely. "And I miss him more than anything."

 **A/N Last chapter's reference was the name "Hyperion Greengrass", from Shayalonnie's The Debt of Time. It's absolutely brilliant, and if you're a fan of time travel and Hermione/Marauders you'll like it. No reference in this chapter, unfortunately.**


	3. Daphne Greengrasses' Resolve

**Daphne Greengrass' Resolve**

Daphne Greengrass wasn't invited to Order meetings. Daphne Greengrass didn't fight in the First Hogsmeade Raid, as it would be called later. Daphne Greengrass, in fact, was barely tolerated.

They sneered at her in the Hogwarts hallways, those laughing Gryffindors. The Hufflepuffs avoided her and pretended they were on that particular moving staircase by accident, and not because they'd rather be late to class than be within five feet of her. The Ravenclaws, at least, weren't as bad, but nobody likes the moderates anyway.

Daphne wondered if Albus Dumbledore, that _shining_ beacon of the light, noticed when Padma Patil was ignored by her sister for months straight because she read about Dark magic in a book she picked in the common room. She wondered if he saw Michael Corner slumped in the shadowy corners of the school with his nose bleeding and an angry, helpless glint in his eye. She wondered if he realized that everyone, not just his useless Order, was suffering.

She still remembered the night her father had pushed her into the Floo to Hogwarts. "Take care of your sister!" he had shouted, wand brandished in his right hand and the Greengrass sword in his left. She, herself, clutched his note in her right hand and Astoria's small fist in her left. The Ministry had fallen to Voldemort and that monster would not stand for the neutrality that her family had held up for generations. They were centrists, first and foremost, skirting the fringes of the traditionally Darker families, and had barely escaped Voldemort's wrath the first go-round.

So when the wards had registered the first spells being fired, Hyperion and Gisela Greengrass had roused their daughters from bed and Summoned their trunks. One hastily-written note later and the two of them were in Hogwarts, cut off from their family and trapped, effectively, in the lion's den. But Hyperion Greengrass knew as well as anyone that Albus Dumbledore, flaws aside, would die for his students. "It may come to that, too," she remembered him saying to her mother in hushed undertones.

With her chin held high and her back held straight— _Show them no weaknesses, Daphne,_ her mother told her, tilting her chin up and pushing her shoulders back—she marched up to Albus Dumbledore at the head table with all of the grace of eleven years of dancing lessons, smiled with all the sweetness of a girl born and bred to become a political viper like Narcissa Malfoy, and handed him the crumpled note in her dainty hand.

Bemused, the man opened the note and read it swiftly. "The entirety of the Slytherin dorms are open to you and your sister, Miss Greengrass," he said with a strange, solemn note in his voice. "I'm sorry to say you are one of the few from your House who came back after the summer holidays."

"Thank you very much for your hospitality, Headmaster," Daphne said, the beatific, polite smile etched upon her porcelain-doll face, and marched right back down to the nearly empty table. Astoria was sniffling, but no tears fell. They didn't fall until hours later, when the two of them were alone in the sixth-year dorm. "Will they be okay?" Astoria asked between sobs. Daphne could only hold her tight. "I don't know," she admitted, the honesty cutting through her cool facade. "I just don't know."

When classes started the Monday after, as everyone tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy with Hogwarts turning into a refuge more day by day with families streaming in through the front gates and secret passageways, Daphne was loath to leave her sister to the tender mercies of her classmates. "I'll be fine, Daph," Astoria told her, all bluster and a devil-may-care smile stretching her lips. "I'll be fine."

But Astoria was not fine. The purple bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her stood out starkly against her pale skin. "Who did this," Daphne bit out, more of a command than a question.

But spines of steel ran in the Greengrass women, and Astoria was no exception. "I handled him," she insisted.

"How?" Daphne asked.

"Cursed him until his knees were so wobbly he needed help to get to the Hospital Wing, which was rather difficult for him to get, seeing as how I put him under a silencing charm."

Daphne raised an eyebrow. Silencing charms were difficult, OWL-level magic. "You've been practicing," she said, in the grand tradition of compliments framed as admonishments.

Astoria smiled wanly back at her. "Whenever I get the chance," she confirmed. Daphne only drew her into a hug in reply.

On Saturdays, when the sun was just barely peeking over the horizon, Daphne would hunt for abandoned classrooms. Hogwarts had many but they shifted location often, and sometimes were occupied. Daphne cringed at the thought of the couple she had once stumbled in on, half-naked and too distracted by the other to notice her quickly backtracking out the door. Once she had found one, which could take from minutes to an entire hour, once, she'd Transfigure the old furniture into things resembling targets. The crude shapes of people, mostly, but even a werewolf once. And then she'd whirl about the room, her feet finding well-trod dueling patterns in her mind's eye. That was her warmup.

Then she'd trace the same patterns around her opponents, bobbing and weaving and ducking around them, while firing different colored balls of paint at them. Red for a Stunner, blue for a cutting curse. If she were feeling particularly bold, she'd fire a green one or two. But most days, only red and blue ran together to form purple drips all over the Transfigured targets. She'd Vanish the mess, then, and head back to the dorm room she shared with her sister to wash up and go to breakfast.

She saw Pansy Parkinson sitting alone every day and wondered if she should sit with her, just once, to see if the caustic, sharp-tongued, and unfortunately asinine witch had changed at all. But the warm presence of her sister by her side reminded Daphne that she had a job to do, and she wouldn't endanger herself or Astoria to pander to a witch that had hated her on principle for years.

No, she'd just sit at the Slytherin table and look the Headmaster straight in his twinkly blue eyes as if daring him to try and invade her mind. She had Occlumency shields, of course, as did her sister. The thought that Gisela Greengrass nee Burke would send her daughters off to a school at which two known Legilimens taught, without any training in the Mind Arts, was laughable.

The world outside the walls of Hogwarts was getting darker. From what she could glean from now-contraband Daily Prophet issues backdated several weeks and even Quibblers, the tabloid now manned from a secret location by Xenophilius Lovegood, it seemed that night was falling upon Wizarding Britain. On nights when she had finished her homework and put her sister to bed, she pieced together a timeline from these scraps of information and whispered gossip in the halls.

On June 18, 1996, the Order along with the DA clashed with the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries. Before this, Voldemort's existence had not been openly acknowledged by anybody save for the headmaster and Harry Potter, who somehow died that night along with the youngest Weasley boy and the mudblood Hermione Granger. _That,_ thought Daphne, _was when everything went wrong._

A week later on June 25th, someone leaked a fragment of a prophecy to the Daily Prophet. Daphne remembered that day well, because her father had been drinking orange juice at the table and his glass had shattered on the hardwood floor. The Wizarding World, shocked and scared, had bemoaned the premature loss of their "Chosen One", which was only slightly less presumptuous than "Dark Lord" in Daphne's opinion.

By June 30th, the Ministry had finally mobilized the Auror Corps. Being so small, Wizarding Britain lacked a functional military and instead relied heavily on their Hit-Wizards for the day-to-day minutiae of policing the streets. The Aurors were reserved for larger threats and dark wizards, and Voldemort counted as both. Daphne had seen the parchments lying haphazardly in her father's office, seen the numbers and blanched. There were 30,000 magicals living in Britain, and only 80 Aurors in fighting shape. She had heard that they were fast-tracking trainees through the Academy, but there were _less than 100 Aurors_. Add that to the twenty-something Order members and the prospects of the Light were looking very bleak indeed.

July 12th was the first real battle since the skirmish a month earlier. Death Eaters and Ministry personnel fought somewhere south of London, resulting in heavy Auror casualties. Sometime in the following weeks, Voldemort would rebrand the outer fringes of his Death Eaters as the Knights of Walpurgis and send them on raids to fight in minor battles. Hyperion Greengrass had pushed his daughters through the Floo on the 3rd of September, the day Voldemort announced his takeover of the Ministry. It was now mid-October, and Voldemort was systematically crushing every village and town that did not cave to his demands. Daphne knew them, too. In her delicate, aristocratic voice, her mother had outlined each of his demands and explained in meticulous detail why Voldemort, this decade's Hitler, could not be allowed to continue.

"He wants us to mark the mudbloods," said Gisela Greengrass, her pretty mouth twisted into a moue of distaste. "Segregate them from us proper folk."

Astoria had taken a moment to grasp why, exactly, this was abhorrent. "If we're proper folk, Mother, why…?" she tried asking.

"Why are we against this?" Gisela asked, one eyebrow raised. Astoria nodded.

Instead of giving her daughter a direct answer, she had risen from her chair in a swish of robes and walked to the bookcase. She threw up a silencing ward Daphne had never heard before, and was so strong that she could feel the magic buzzing on her skin.

Delicate pianist fingers danced over the spines of the books before her mother pulled out a slim volume, decidedly newer-looking. She handed it to her youngest daughter. "This," Gisela said, "is a book on the connection between Grindelwald's war and the what the muggles call World War Two. Read it, my darling, because when a man like this rises to power, it means terrible things."

Astoria left the book closed as Daphne watched silently from the corner. "But they're mudbloods," she said. "Why does it matter what happens to them?"

Gisela Greengrass took Astoria's small hands in her own, gripping them firmly. "Because though they may be an unfortunate accident of birth, they are not the magic-stealing demons the Dark Lord pretends they are. And though they are ignorant of our traditions, they are not savages for loving their own. And most of all, Astoria, the muggleborns—"

Daphne had sucked in a sharp breath. That was the first time she had ever heard her mother refer to them without the slur.

"—did not choose their parents," she said fiercely. "Read the book, Astoria, and it will become clear to you why V-V-Voldemort," she paused to collect herself, "must be stopped. Why we must not cave to the demands of a tyrant and a genocidal maniac."

She glanced at her oldest daughter. "Do not speak a word of this to your father," she warned. "Hyperion has always been neutral, but he will not stand for the things I have said today."

Daphne nodded curtly, nd watched as Astoria fled the library with the book gripped tightly. Gisela looked at her, searching her face, before leaving too.

As she felt the silencing ward collapse some minutes later, Daphne sank to the floor.

Then, she had felt only crushing despair and the knowledge that her parents would not survive the war. Because this was shaping up to be a war, no matter how the parents used to paint the issue of Voldemort as merely domestic terrorism. No, this would be a civil war, with all of the blood such a title required.

It had frightened Daphne, that she thought such things. And she could not confide in Astoria and worry her younger sister more.

But now, alone and surrounded by what, by any definition of the word, were her enemies, Daphne only felt anger. Anger that her parents had not followed them through the Floo. Angry at the ineffectual headmaster for allowing his school to become a war base for the rapidly dwindling Light. Angry that the people around her couldn't see past their petty House rivalries and family grudges to realize that Daphne and Astoria Greengrass were only trying their best to survive. It sickened her, their bias and prejudice. She wanted to tell them that she was not her parents, who still looked down on muggleborns for all their talk of neutrality. She wanted to tell them she was more than her last name.

And it had occurred to her on multiple occasions the irony that the Light could not look past her family, _her blood_ , while fighting for muggleborn rights and freedoms.

Sometimes Daphne wondered if she had joined the right side. Sometimes she wondered if her parents had thrown their lot in with the Light only to die as martyrs, or, even worse, as unnamed corpses on a battlefield. She'd reassure herself that Albus Dumbledore, with all of his faults and foibles, was no Voldemort. He would not torture or kill people for the fun of it, or because he had a bad day and needed to blow off some steam.

Still, Daphne was tired of her life being decided for her by powerful men.

In her abandoned classroom, she stood from where she had rested in a Transfigured chair. "What right do they have?" she snarled at the stone walls.

That was the question, wasn't it?

So when she heard stirrings of an Order meeting, Daphne Greengrass scanned the Great Hall. She saw Nymphadora Tonks, who was her second cousin several times removed, get up quickly at the prompting of one Kingsley Shacklebolt, accomplished Auror and Dumbledore's left-hand man. _Aurors will notice me_ , she determined, and looked around once more. Then she saw one of the Weasleys—the twin?—leaving. She hopped off her seat. "Go to your dorms," she said in a low voice. "Follow Pansy Pansy Parkinson straight there and lock the door. I'll be back when I can."

Astoria nodded sharply as Daphne tailed the shock of bright red hair bobbing through the crowd. She followed him up several flights of stairs to a door she had never seen before in a hallway she had passed through on multiple occasions. When she heard the tell-tale thunk of Alastor Moody's peg-leg, she winced and swore silently. That man could see through Disillusionment charms.

So she cast the charm but did not enter the room, crouching instead right outside the door. Black nearly bowled into her after several minutes of straining her ears, trying to catch snippets of the conversations. A little later, she heard Moody's gruff voice.

"I'll get Black."

With a barely-squashed _eep!_ Daphne scrambled away from the door, undoing the charm as she did so. She scrambled to the stairs and turned, pretending she had been coming up them all along. Moody didn't even acknowledge her, pulling a worn-piece of parchment from his pocket and tapping it with his wand, mumbling under his breath.

Daphne decided she'd better cut her losses now than risk getting caught and Obliviated—she shivered at the thought of someone rummaging around in her head—and turned left down the corridor.

She was so caught up in a whirling mess of discoveries and half-heard words that she didn't realize her feet had taken her nearly to Gryffindor Tower. With a huff, she turned, nearly crashing into the Weasley she had followed to the Order meeting. He didn't seem to notice her, thank heavens, and passed by in a cloud of misery.

She glanced after him for a long moment before traveling back to the dungeons. She had a lot to think about.

 **A/N The population of Wizarding Britain seems to be one of the numerous numerical inconsistencies of the books. I took the population from www** _ **dot**_ **seven-fifty** _ **dot**_ **net** _ **slash**_ **wizpop** _ **dot**_ **htm. A quick Google search told me that there are about 20 police officers per 10k people, so I extrapolated and added a few more, since, as Daphne tells us, this is wartime. Rowling also never specifies the exact purpose of the Hitwizards, so I'm thinking they're kind of like the everyday law-enforcer type rather than specialized Dark Wizard hunters. Anybody catch the reference? Hint: "notoriously complex magic system".**


	4. Minerva McGonagall's Strength

**Minerva McGonagall's Strength**

Minerva stared apprehensively at the piece of parchment in her hand. On it were the words she planned to speak during the ritual. On it was the words she had to speak during the ritual, which she muttered quietly under her breath as Albus went over the circle's runes one more time. She had asked herself on more than one occasion since the meeting a day prior if what they were doing was the right thing. Could she do it? she wondered.

So many things had gone wrong, and not just surrounding Harry Potter. They had all failed that boy, but they had failed his parents even more.

She remembered James and Lily well. James, ever the troublemaker and a bully in his youth, had nevertheless excelled in her class. Lily had always been Filius' favorite, of course, but Transfiguration had been her third-best subject after Potions. Which really, Minerva admonished herself, meant nothing, because Lily Evans excelled at everything except Herbology. She had never had the patience for it, Pomona would tell her sadly in the years following their deaths.

James had never been any good at Potions. Too busy throwing ingredients into Slytherin cauldrons and without the attention span necessary for proper timing, James barely scraped an A on that particular OWL.

She tore herself abruptly out of her reverie when Albus said softly, "It's time."

The seven of them, all clad in pure white ritual robes, stepped into their points of the circle. Molly Weasley stood at the top. Her wand trembled slightly in her hands and Minerva fought down the urge to go to the woman, to comfort her and tell her it would all be alright. She would ruin the ritual circle if she did that, and what comfort could she offer than wasn't pretty words, anyway?

Beside Molly stood George, his own wand steady and a kind of grim determination in his eyes. The look tugged on Minerva's heart. She had seen it on far too many of her students as they headed into battle, knowing that death lurked before them but charging in anyway.

Next to George, Severus Snape stood with his shoulders rolled forward and his expression as sour as it always was. His grip on his wand was so tight his knuckles turned white. Albus was to Severus' left, his own eyes as twinkly as ever. Was it Minerva's imagination, or was their something almost...reluctant in Albus' posture? She pushed the thought away.

Nymphadora's hair was its usual cheerful bubblegum pink, but her smile was strained. Remus was standing at the next point, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to reach out to her.

The mother, the brother, the enemy, the mentor, the friend, the required Dark wizard to balance out the abundance of Light magic swirling through the room (because though Remus would always fight for the Light, he was a Dark creature first and foremost), and her, the seer, completing the seven-pointed star.

"And so it begins," Albus said grimly, and brought his wand down in a flurry of sparks. Remus jolted into action, sealing off the circle with a series of borderline Dark spells.

"I, Molly Prewett Weasley, stand for my family!" said Molly, her voice quivering slightly. "I stand for the love we have for each other. I summon my son—" her voice cracked, "to this dark world!" She drew a penknife from her pocket and cut off a chunk of her red hair. She placed it at her feet and tossed the penknife across the star to Nymphadora. With a wince, the former Auror cleared her throat and said loudly, as if challenging some higher power, "I, Nymphadora Tonks, stand for myself!"

And with both her parents dead, it was true, Minerva thought sadly.

"I stand for what has been broken and brought back. I summon my friend!" And she drew the knife across the palm of her hand and let blood drop onto the runes at her feet, which flashed a bright crimson. She threw it to George.

"I, George Fabian Weasley, stand for the dead. I stand for whom we have lost, and I summon my brother from across the void." With a shake of his head, he left his tears fall to the floor and gave the knife to Remus.

"I, Remus John Lupin, stand for the injured. I stand for the pain each of us have felt. I summon the light!" He, too, cut his palm with the knife and let his blood drip on the Hogwarts stones.

Severus was next. "I, Severus Tobias Snape, stand for what could have been. I stand for the possibilities this damn war has extinguished, and I summon the object of my pain." He spat on the ground and tossed the knife, with no little bitter viritol, across to Minerva.

"I, Minerva McGonagall, stand for my students. I stand for their suffering and for their hope. I summon Harry James Potter!" With a hiss, she clenched her hand around the knife and let her blood run down the handle. She shut her eyes and thought of Harry, only Harry, because as the seer her job was to keep the building intention of everyone in the circle focused. It was a momentous task, and she knew if she let her concentration waver the summoning would go terribly, dreadfully wrong. The wording of the ritual was so deliberately vague they might summon Fred, or James, or some strange monster directly from hell.

She threw the knife blindly, praying it would make its way to Albus so he might finish the ritual.

"I, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, stand for our freedom!" he roared, his voice so bolstered by magic that each and every one of them could feel the power reverberating in their bones. "I stand for all those fighting for a better future! And I summon my student, their son, their brother, their friend and their light and their pain!" She heard the faint plop of blood on stones, and with a crack, the air in the room seemed to split with a terrible force. It felt like the tolling of a thousand bells, like forty gongs struck at once. Wind whipped around the room, so strong it nearly pushed George out of his sector of the star, both shoving them all away from the center and drawing them in.

"Hold!" commanded Albus Dumbledore, the magic forcing them into a sort of modified Body-Bind. Minerva kept her eyes shut tightly against the wind and—Merlin, were those _voices_? No, not voices. The wind was howling in the small room, like the sound of panpipes only amplified to tremendous heights. _Don't think about it_ , Minerva admonished herself, and forced her thoughts to Harry. Harry James Potter, small, scrawny, and with a dangerous glint in his eyes—green, like Lily's—so reminiscent of his father. Never as mischievous as the twins...or perhaps, just as trouble-making, just in different ways. The troll, Minerva recalled. She remembered sprinting through the halls with the other members of the staff and coming upon a scene that by any rights, should have been a tragedy. Would have been a tragedy, if not for Harry James Potter and Ronald Bilius Weasley. Hermione Granger had been there too, taking the blame for an incident that had certainly not been her fault. Such a brilliant witch, even at that young age.

The three of them had been incorrigible, Minerva thought fondly, before flinching away. _Concentrate._

Harry James Potter and the sarcasm and snark that was uniquely his own. His mother had been nothing but polite, Minerva remembered, and James had had this kind of roguish charm that drew the girls in his year to him like flies to honey and had gotten him out of numerous detentions. Harry with his strange need to save people, the part of him that rebelled when people were in danger. His parents had been similar, she realized, but never to the ridiculous extent he had taken it.

And it had gotten him killed.

She shifted gears abruptly, still keeping the boy in her mind's eye. Not as gifted as his Miss Granger in theory, no—but suited to practical demonstration more than anything. He had thrived in Defense, hadn't he? And able to cast the Patronus at such a young age. He had been a leader, too, she remembered. A natural leader and teacher.

Not for the first time, she felt a flare of doubt. Were they doing the right thing? Would the Harry they summoned be their Harry, or someone fundamentally different?

She pushed the thought away. _None of that,_ she told herself.

It had been all of ten seconds of Minerva's frantic visualization when it was like the air folden in on itself. With a massive thunderclap, a bright light exploded from the center of the ritual circle and ejected them forcibly from their positions.

Minerva landed hard on her arse, groaning. She scrubbed at her eyes, trying to fix her temporary blindness from the flashbang. What she saw made her gasp—in recognition and horror—and made a feeling of deep foreboding settle in her gut like a lead weight.

A man with a head of dark hair crouched in an unorthodox—but dreadfully familiar—dueling stance. A wand was clenched in his left fist as he shielded wandlessly with the other, the glimmering blue of a standard Protego dull in comparison from the bright light of the ritual. "What," the man bit out, "the fuck?"

"That's not Harry," George muttered, leaning against the wall with a pained expression on his face. "And I think I cracked a rib."

Minerva could only sit in shock because _she knew that man_. Recollections of school years from what must have been an age ago pushed their way to the front of her mind.

" _Tom?_ " she heard Albus ask incredulously.

Tom Riddle, she thought faintly. They had managed to summon proto-Lord Voldemort himself. She remembered him, all right. Three years older than her and in a different house entirely, Minerva McGonagall hadn't known him very well at all. But she had seen him, known _of_ him, because it had been impossible in those days to be unaware of the name Tom Riddle. Rumors shadowed the man like a cloak, even as a teenager. Whispers in the halls of _did you see what he did to Avery the other day?_ and _Lacey told me he speaks to snakes_ and, once, _I heard Nott is in the Hospital Wing because he challenged Tom to a duel._ Minerva had scoffed at the last one as a young girl, because Nott had been an incredible dueler. Poetry in motion, Professor Merrythought had said.

Years later, Minerva had scoffed still. From what she knew of Tom Riddle now, if he had truly duelled Nott, there wouldn't be anything left of him to put in the Hospital Wing.

And now he was in front of her.

"Don't move," she hissed through clenched teeth, scrambling to her feet and pointing her wand at him. Remus and Tonks had similarly recovered, but Molly was out cold on the floor. _The ritual must have taken a lot out of her, or she knocked her head against the stones_ , Minerva thought. Albus was stock still, looking at his former student with an expression of abject horror. But Severus had his wand up too, his own face impassive.

"Don't move?" Riddle asked, an edge of incredulity creeping into his voice. "If this is some sick prank I swear, I'm going to hang Fred and George by their damn _toes_ on the dungeon ceilings."

George let out a low moan at his brother's name, and Riddle whipped his head to look at him. "Where's Fred?" he asked quizzically, not threatening at all.

Minerva could only stare.

Remus, however, seemed to be under no such obligations. "Who the hell are you?" he snarled. "You're not Harry."

"Obviously," Riddle drawled, still crouched in a dueling stance. "You're not Remus Lupin either, by the way. It's a nice impersonation, but I'm afraid the real Remus has far fewer scars and far less of an attitude."

He surveyed the room quietly, lifting one dark eyebrow in surprise and confusion. "Who in Merlin's name are you?" he asked, addressing Tonks. "I don't believe we've met."

She bristled, her hair turning a violent shade of red. "Nymphadora Tonks," she said proudly, and tossed her head.

"Muggleborn?" he asked placidly, not a trace of malice in his voice.

"Halfblood. Andromeda Tonks' daughter."

Riddle raised both eyebrows then. "Andromeda Tonks has a daughter? A halfblood, Metamorphmagus daughter?"

Tonks immediately looked a bit sick. "That's me," she agreed, and lifted her wand slightly higher. "And who're you?"

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," he said, sweeping a slight bow. "Professor of DADA at the _esteemed_ "—his voice dripped with sarcasm and annoyance—"Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Now, can we all stop pointing our wands at each other and have a civil conversation? I fear Dumbledore may choke on one of his lemondrops, and poor Minnie looks like she's about the have a heart attack."

Minerva watched as his dark blue eyes slid off to the left and down. He shook his head very slightly before refocusing on Tonk's wand, which was pointed right between his eyes. "Please?" he tried.

With a loud exhale, Minerva stepped closes. "If we can get an Unbreakable Vow that you will do us no harm," she said, "then we can talk."

Tom Riddle's mouth twisted into a half-smile. "I don't make those lightly, Minerva, dear. You best give me a damn good reason before I make one of those."

She pursed her lips and shot a spell into the air. It was one of those strange, novelty prank spells she had borrowed from Fred, Merlin rest his soul. The blue light burst above their heads, showering the room with a fine blanket of—

"Cooking flour?" Tom asked incredulously, having shielded himself from it. Yet he had neglected to shield the lump of _something_ by his left knee. He seemed to grasp Minerva's intention a split-second later. "Ah, that," he muttered, and Banished the flour with a sweep of his wand. Remus had shifted his aim to where the lump had been, scowling even harder.

"Might as well come out then," Riddle said, cold eyes calculating. "I believe we've been found out."

A shimmering, opaque fabric was tossed to the floor and three people seemingly appeared out of thin air, all with identical fierce expressions and wands gripped tightly in their hands. "What are we doing in the Room of Requirement, Professor?" asked Hermione Granger, her riotous mass of curls cropped to her chin. Her usually soft and inquisitive brown eyes were narrowed in concentration. She dropped into the exact same dueling stance Riddle had adopted upon his arrival, with only a slight shift in her stance to account for the height difference.

"The Headmaster doesn't look great," Ron Weasley observed, a Protego cast from his wand in front of the three. "Reckon he's had a heart attack?"

"The pink hair is cool," said Harry Potter, looking at Tonks. "But the threats are getting a bid old." He stretched out a finger and poked it away, grinning in an exact imitation of his father.

That was when Minerva McGonagall really did keel over in a faint.

 **A/N The paintball training exercise was a reference to TheImportanceOfLungs' fic, Wizard of the Kaleidoscope. It's a fun read and has very nice worldbuilding, especially if you're someone who isn't familiar with the Nasuverse.**


	5. Ron Weasley's Dread

**Ron Weasley's Dread**

It had not been a great day, Ron reflected. Hermione, as usual, had been busy at her dueling lessons with Professor Riddle. That girl never took a break, not even on weekends. Either she was training, or studying, or eating so fast Ron worried she would get sick. And then she'd disappear back into her room in the Slytherin dorms to sleep. Or train more, Ron supposed. He wasn't sure exactly what she did once Ron and Harry walked her back to the dungeons.

So when Harry had had his second mental breakdown of the fall semester, knocking his head against the wall of the dorm room they shared in Gryffindor Tower, Ron had been at an utter loss. "Look, mate, you'll do fine," he soothed, patting Harry awkwardly on the shoulder.

"Mum and Dad are gonna kill me," he moaned, and slammed his head against the wall with a slightly greater force than before.

"Don't say that," Ron argued. "They love you and you'll do fine."

"It's OWL year!" Harry exclaimed, removing his head from the wall to glare at his best friend. "OWL. Year. And I need top marks in Charms, Potions, Transfiguration, Arithmancy, _and_ Herbology to get accepted into the early Healer track. Why the hell am I taking Arithmancy? I should have taken Care, or DADA with Hermione. I'm gonna die!"

Harry had started banging his head against the wall again. With a resigned sigh, Ron dragged Harry from the battered piece of architecture and onto his bed. "Calm down," Ron told him seriously. "It's, like, the second week of term. And you're doing _fine._ " He allowed himself a bit of a grimace. "Better than me, really."

"You have less classes!" Harry exclaimed. "The Auror track doesn't even require Herbology!"

"Yeah, but I'm taking Runes. Babbling is a _pain_ in the afternoons, did you know that? It's like she only had enough patience for the morning classes. Now stop griping and get ready for breakfast. I want to see if I can drag Hermione away from Riddle to play chess with me."

That made Harry stop. "She's terrible at chess," he reminded Ron.

Ron grinned crookedly, feeling the butterflies in his stomach he always got when thinking about Hermione multiply in number. "Yeah, I know," he said.

Harry snorted and, rubbing at his forehead, stalked off to the bathroom. "You're in trouble," he called over his shoulder.

"I know," Ron repeated to himself in the empty dorm room.

Later, as he trekked down to the Great Hall with Harry, he contemplated his best female friend and potential love interest. She had recently cut her hair, apparently on Riddle's recommendation. "Hair gets caught when fighting Dark wizards," she had sniffed. "The Knights of Walpurgis aren't going to stop and let me untangle myself while they're shooting curses at me." Hermione had then given Harry a critical glance. "You'd make a terrible Auror," she decided, lingering on his glasses. "All anybody's need to do is summon those and you're effectively blind."

"Good thing for the Ministry that I'm not gonna be an Auror," Harry said cheerfully. This was in the middle of the first week, and Harry was just coming of the tail of a rather large panic attack.

"Good thing for Dark Wizards too," Ron said slyly, helping himself to a piece of bread. "You'd steal the robes off their back for a lark."

Harry had grinned widely. He had his father's tendency for mischief but his mother's neurosis about grades, which made for a rather strange combination in Ron's opinion. And Hermione was Riddle's protege duelist with one eye on the Auror track and another on possible becoming a bounty hunter, but she had only mentioned that once so Ron still wasn't entirely sure if she had been joking.

Then there was him, the youngest boy in a family of seven kids. Bill was the cursebreaker, Charlier the dragon handler. Percy took the bureaucratic Ministry job, and the twins had been throwing around the idea of opening a store. Ginny already knew she wanted to play professional Quidditch. Ron? He had no idea what was left for him, so he had shuffled the pamphlets Percy had sent to him and picked one off the top.

Auror.

He had wondered if he really wanted to stand between Hermione and her dream job, then decided he might as well. She might be able to help him if he turned out to be pants at the required realized he would probably regret it later, when he inevitably failed the end of the year tests.

But it really had been a bad day, because Hermione wasn't around to deal with Harry's neurosis, he had gotten his essay back from McGonagall and saw the P scrawled at the top, and Fred George had put dung bombs in his trunk that morning. Not to mention he had seen Draco Malfoy skulking around the corridors, looking like he was up to no good as usual.

So Ron made his way down to breakfast in the Great Hall all by himself, and sat at his customary position at the far end of the table. He glanced briefly over to the Slytherin table to see if Hermione had come up to eat, and there was a noticeable gap where she usually was. He wondered if she had somehow managed to schedule more dueling classes with Professor Riddle, and decided it wouldn't be too out of character if she had.

Ron picked his breakfast, wondering if the rest of the day would be as bad as this morning has been. He glanced up at the head table, eyes sliding off the headmaster's seat.

Ron could count the number of times he had seen the aging headmaster, other than at meals, on one hand. The man was elusive and rather detached from the student population and was only called upon when extreme disciplinary action was called for—as Hermione said. "Professor Riddle told me he's going senile," she confided one day with a toss of her brown curls.

Ron remembered snapping, "Merlin, can't we talk about something other than Riddle? Or dueling?" he added the last when he saw her open her mouth, eyes narrowed indignantly.

"I'm never going to get into the Auror program if I don't work hard," she snapped back. "You of all people should know that muggleborns can't get anywhere unless they're exceptional."

Harry had jumped in with a frown. "Or unless they've got friends in high places," he told them. His own mother was a muggleborn witch who had become the leading Healer at St. Mungo's through both hard work and Dumbledore's dubious patronage. It certainly had helped that her husband was a well-known pureblood Auror, but Ron knew better than to say that in front of Harry—or Hermione.

Hermione had nodded at Harry's statement. "I need to be the best," she said firmly, and left soon after that.

Ron remembered sitting back in his chair with a groan and a sigh. "She's gonna work herself to death," he muttered. Harry winced. "She's just got a chip on her shoulder, Ron, you know that."

"I still don't understand why," he grumbled. "She was fine until second year, and then she came back from Easter break with a note promising private lessons from Riddle and suddenly everything's about being the best."

Harry sighed. "That's her story to tell, Ron, you know that."

"And I don't understand why she told _you_!" Ron exclaimed, feeling his familiar temper bubble to the surface. He felt hurt all over again like that wintry day in second year when Hermione had cried into Harry's shoulder and refused to tell him, who was supposedly her other best friend, what was wrong.

"I don't know why either, mate," Harry replied with a strange sense of honesty, and began to pack his book bag. "See you in Charms."

So now Ron sat at the Gryffindor table, feeling utterly alone and becoming progressively more annoyed. He was picking at his bacon when someone plopped onto the bench next to him. "Hello," said dreamy voice, and Ron glanced up, surprised. "Luna," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"You look lonely," she explained in her simple way. He raised an eyebrow. "I've been lonely before," he pointed out.

"You're the kind of lonely I can help with," she replied. Ron laughed. "How could you possibly help me?"

Luna gave him an appraising look, then stood from the bench with a queer smile on her face. She held out one small hand to him, and tilted her head. "Why don't we go for a walk?"

Ron glanced around, and saw that no one was looking at him. He took out his wand and cast a Tempus charm. "Luna, we have class soon."

Luna smiled wider. "When has that ever stopped you?"

He considered for a moment, then smiled back at her. "Let's go."

The two of them left the Great Hall and made their way onto the grounds. Luna led him by the hand and Ron let her, bemused. "The Giant Squid is grumpy today," she said, and began to skip. "So why're we going towards the lake?" Ron asked.

She laughed, a clear, ringing noise that made the side of mouth tug upwards. "To cheer him up, silly," she told him. "Sometimes grumpy people should be left alone, you know, but sometimes the worst thing you can do is to leave them in their own thoughts." Ron was mulling over the insightfulness of her statement when she added, "The nollywhatsits have been eating at you today," she said, completely seriously.

Ron groaned. "What are nollywhatsits, even?" he asked.

She shrugged and said, rather pointedly, "What do _you_ think they are?" Ron was at a loss as to how to answer this question.

Luna Lovegood, he mused, was peculiar. Everyone at Hogwarts, even the firsties, knew that the blonde was spacey on the best of days and outright batty on the others. He had never really spoken to her for the first few years she had attended, but the previous year, Ron had been rather out of luck for a date to the Yule Ball.

"Harry," he remembered whining, "How come you got a date?" His best friend had managed to pull Parvati Patil in their year, _somehow_.

Harry blushed but smiled anyway, and said slyly, "It might've worked out better if you thought to ask sooner, you know," he said.

Ron had groaned. "Girls always travel in packs," he pointed out, quite rightly. "I haven't managed to ask _anybody_ before now."

"What about Ginny's friend?" Harry asked.

"Looney?" Ron asked then. "But she's—"

"Unattached," Harry said firmly.

Ron caved and asked her, and they had struck up a strange kind of friendship after that. Luna would greet him in the halls with her detached gaze and wide, unfaltering smile. Ron would say a few choice words to her Ravenclaw roommates. Ron would chuck bacon at the Lovegood owl—a surprisingly normal-looking Western Screech—and Luna would fold origami cranes. She would make them out of parchment scraps and animate them with a finicky spell Ron hadn't managed to master , then send them to him at the oddest times. He had received one in the middle of the night once. It had landed on his face during one of his better dreams and woken him with a static jolt.

Now that was a spell he couldn't even find in the library, much less recreate.

Faced with answering Luna's question, Ron only did what any good Gryffindor would do. He made something up.

"I think," he said slowly, imagining what exactly a nollywhatsit would do, "that a nollywhatsit is a bit like a bed bug."

Luna nodded, her protruding eyes looking at him very seriously.

"Because they nibble at you when you're not paying attention to them," he continued, "And they made the next day very annoying."

Luna nodded again. "Quite," she agreed. "They have a single tooth, you know, but their saliva is poisonous to humans. It makes your mood go—" and here she made a sound where her voice started high and _woooped_ to a low, and swooped her hand from shoulder level to somewhere by their knees. She popped back up with a smile and a tilt of her head. "I'm glad to see someone else sees them," she said seriously.

"No, Luna—" Ron started, not wanting her to jump to conclusions, when she laughed and stood on her tip-toes. She put an arm around his shoulder. "I'm just teasing," she said airily.

Ron had to laugh, then, at the irony of _Luna Lovegood_ teasing him.

"I'm feeling better already," he admitted, and Luna's arm tightened around his shoulders. "Good," she said. "Because I have a feeling that everything is going to get worse before it gets any better."

And no matter how many times he laughed as they walked back to the castle, he couldn't dislodge the sick feeling in his gut.

 **A/N Did you spot the reference? It's to a particular work by a rather prolific Dramione writer who is friends with Shayalonnie. Also if anyone has any guesses as to what happened to Hermione in second year, drop them in a review!**


	6. Draco Malfoy's Guilt

**Draco Malfoy's Guilt**

Draco felt sick. He locked eyes with the trembling woman in front of him, the tip of his wand digging into her pale forehead, and pressed his dry lips together. She's filth, he told himself. Not even a mudblood, not a drop of stolen magic running through her dirty veins.

Her eyes were wide and blue, like the summer sky. He hadn't seen the sky without the distortion of a glass pane for weeks now.

Less than an animal, he chanted inside his head, less, less, less. Almost in reply, she let out a very human whimper.

"Please," she whispered. "Please."

Please what? Draco wondered distantly. Please, mercy? Or please, let me die, and make it quick? Because Draco knew he wasn't the first to have a go at this pathetic muggle woman, partially immobilized on the dark hardwood of the manor's floor, though he didn't see any blood. His mother would have thrown a fit, because even house elf magic couldn't get stains out of these floors.

Her lips were moving but no sound escaped them. Her chest heaved as she took rapid, shallow breaths.

Draco's wand arm was shaking.

He thanked his lucky stars, if they existed, that nobody was around to notice.

Someone banged on the door of the study room. "Hurry up, Malfoy, we're waiting for a turn too!" came the rough voice of Walden MacNair. Unconsciously, Draco shivered. The tall man with the axe and scowl frightened him perhaps somewhat more than the useless posturing with wands that the others preferred. MacNair had a battleaxe and was not afraid to use it.

"Please," the woman repeated, and Draco shut his eyes. He took a breath and cast a _diffindo_ blindly, hearing her sharp intake of breath.

He opened his eyes to see the shallow cut he had opened up on her forearm. Blood welled by the edges, bright crimson in the half-light of the study. "I tortured you," Draco said, quietly enough that whoever was waiting outside the study. "I made it so you couldn't scream."

The woman shuddered and began to cry, her tears dripping onto her arm and mixing with the blood. "Kill me," she whispered. "That one—the one just outside—he—" More tears roll down her cheeks.

Draco bit back the bile rising in his throat and the press of his own tears. He leveled his wand again, let it dig into her forehead. "Av—" he tried, but choked on the words.

He didn't know how long the two of them were frozen there, her face raised in supplication and his own turned away because if he looked into her summer blue eyes again he would break completely. As the banging on the door resumed, he grit his teeth and lowered his wand. He turned, took a step toward the door, and began to tuck his wand into his robe picket.

"Please," the woman cried.

He put his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and shut the door behind him. "She's all yours," he said woodenly, but it wasn't MacNair standing there. It was his godfather, looming over him like he had just failed an important test. "Did you kill her?" Severus Snape asked, leaning on the wall.

"No."

"Why not?" Uncle Sev asked, and for once in his life, Draco did not know the right answer. _Why not?_ he wondered, and scrubbed a hand across his face. _I couldn't,_ he said silently. _I just couldn't._

But instead he tilted his head, smirked, and narrowed his eyes. "MacNair wanted to play," he heard himself say. "It would be too much of a pain to go and fetch another one, not after Rosier went to all that trouble."

He sauntered down the hall, acutely aware of the penetrating gaze of the potions professor digging into his back.

It seemed like his chambers were miles away from the study as he walked through the manor, avoiding where the shadows seemed to pool like water. In the lower levels, like where the study was, magic moved sluggishly through the air—an unfortunate byproduct of whatever the Dark Lord was doing in the dungeons. Draco didn't know what he was doing down there, and didn't care to find out. Yet it didn't seem like anybody knew either. Just rumors, as thick in the air as the miasma of magic.

 _He's summoning things_ , the Death Eaters whispered. _Old things._

The higher he climbed, the easier it was for him to breathe without the weight of power, plain and simple, pressing on his chest. Or perhaps that was due to the distance he was putting between himself and the study? The study, and the muggle woman inside it, kneeling on the floor as if she were praying to a god.

Gods are invincible.

He was not.

When he arrived, _finally_ , at the door to his rom, he let himself in quietly and locked it with a quick mutter of "Colloportus."

He picked a book blindly from the stack by his bedside and fell onto the sheets. He cracked it open and did his best to escape to somewhere entirely different. The title was _Underneath the Ministry_ , and the disclaimer at the beginning called it utter fiction.

 _Good,_ Draco thought.

Chapter 1 : Allusion

Some say that the world began with a bang and will someday go out with a whimper. Some disagree and say that no, that's ridiculous, the world began with a Word with a capital "W". That sounds like hogwash, others say, the world began when an omnipotent being decided that they wanted an earth and so made it with a thought. Every civilization that has cropped up since has wondered where they came from and, more than that, wondered why.

The answer, of course, is 42, though no-one has yet deciphered the question. (Though that, as of yet, is irrelevant.)

The wizards were no different—the ones in Britain existing in one particular time stream, at least, because there are all sorts of other wizards in other places, other Earths, and other times. These are the wizards with bastardized Latin incantations and phoenixes and who believe that love will conquer all, given a little bit of time and sacrifices to work with. Did I say sacrifices? I meant people.

In this particular time and space, the beginning of the wizards' misfortune was not a mysterious egg (as it so often is), unchecked imperialism, or even a seemingly-innocuous sugar bowl.

No, both the world and misfortune (because the two go hand in hand) began with a veil. Specifically, an archway covered by a veil, though the archway was never as important as the veil itself. The last is where the wizards always went wrong in the years later. If the archway were destroyed, the veil would endure, a floating, unanchored piece of fabric, imbued with what the muggles called magic and the wizards called death.

The Veil is made of neither. It is the fabric of could-have-beens and what-may-bes and conceals uncertainty in its myriad of forms. It is the foil to the Hall of Prophecy, which is a room full of absolutes and threads of fate already pulled taut. The Veil deals in what could generously be called possibilities.

Wizards who have the misfortune to draw too near hear the voices of what they think are their loved ones but are really alternate futures, different paths they could have taken. The Veil is temptation and longing rolled into one, from which, perhaps unsurprisingly given its nature, sprang the Mirror of Erised.

The Unspeakables who study it, deep in the bowels of the Ministry of magic, never dare to touch the fabric for fear of being sucked in. Instead, they foolishly study the proto-runes scratched into the archway and attempt to take samples of the magic surrounding the Veil like a cloud. Not even their best and brightest realized that the fabric predates the archway by millenia, and that the runes were etched years thousands of years after it was built to anchor the unsettlingly free-floating gauze.

A knock at the door startled Draco into closing the book, which had begun to sound less and less like fiction.

"I'm indisposed!" he called, hoping that whoever it was would leave him alone. "This is urgent," came a quiet, familiar voice from outside. With a curse, Draco leapt to his feet and crossed to the door. He Unlocked the door and yanked the person from outside into his room. "You can't be seen," he hissed, scanning the pale face of Hermione Granger with an almost manic desperation. If she was seen, if someone noticed, he would die, no question about it. And she would too. It would just take longer.

"I know that," she hissed back, their noses almost touching. "Of course I know that."

"Then what's so _urgent_ that you're knocking at my door while completely exposed in the hallway?" Draco sneered, hiding his worry.

"There's been an enormous shift in the ley lines," Hermione told him. "I'm downstairs, almost all the time, and you know your manor was built on a ley line. I was trying a very magic sensitive spell when suddenly it just _fizzed_. Magic doesn't just _fizz_ , Malfoy, and I could feel it all around me. It was like a rubber band just snapped."

"Rubber band?"

"Muggle thing," Hermione waved a hand dismissively, before refocusing her steady gaze on Draco's. "Listen to me," she said, her voice intense. "Something major just occured and Draco, if I felt it, Vol—the Dark Lord did too."

Draco felt all the blood drain from his face. "He'll call the Death Eaters," he whispered.

"Which means you need to prepare yourself for what's ahead," Hermione said grimly, and, gripping his hand, led him to his bed. "We have contingency plans, remember that, okay?"

Draco fisted the sheets of his bed and tried to steady his breathing. When the Dark Lord was in the dungeons underneath the manor, he could pretend that Voldemort was was somewhere else, like at the Ministry. But if he called his followers, it would be massive. It would be public. It would be walking a tightrope fifty miles in the sky.

Hermione was gathering vials into her arms and had plucked Draco's wand from a side table. "C'mon, Malfoy, you know what to do," she said, and tossed the wand onto his lap. She held out three large empty vials.

Woodenly, he put his wand to his temple and extracted silvery white memories. In his head, they faded somewhat. The color of her hair was suddenly less vibrant, the sound of her laugh—rare enough in this purgatory—dimmed, and, really, all his positive memories of Hermione Granger became less saturated. Gradually, they faded, until there was only a dull echo of joy, trust, and longing. He put the memories into the vials, corked them, and handed them back to Hermione.

She handed him a quill and a piece of paper. "Write the note," she urged.

In his usual cursive, he wrote, "Put the memories back in."

"Good," she said, exhaling, and held out her hand for his wand. "I've plenty of practice with this spell, Malfoy. I won't turn you into a vegetable," she told him when he hesitated. He knew he could trust her, knew it implicitly, and still his hand shook around his wand.

He squeezed his eyelids shut and handed her the wand. "Do it," he whispered, and took a shuddering breath.

"Be brave, Draco. Obliviate," Hermione Granger muttered, and everything went dark and silent.

 **A/N I'm sorry for how late this chapter is. Between school, side projects, and life in general along with a healthy dose of writer's block, this chapter has been sitting unfinished in my computer for a while now. It's also rather short, because I wanted to finish and get it out as quickly as possible. Guest, thank you so much for your reviews! They really inspired me to keep writing.**

 **Just to clarify, the ritual went wrong, which is why it was possible for Other Hermione to be summoned. Draco and Hermione's history will become clear soon. Last chapter's reference was to Colubrina, who invented Luna's nollywhatsits. A few references to original literature cropped up in Draco's book, by the way-I just couldn't resist.**


	7. Hermione Granger's Anguish

**Hermione Granger's Anguish**

She would never forget the expression on Harry's face as he pushed Sirius out of the way and fell backwards into the Veil. His green eyes had widened and his eyebrows had drawn together, and then the wispy fabric covering the archway had swallowed him whole. Ron, a brain still attached to his arm, had ran at Bellatrix— _that foolhardy idiot,_ Hermione thought fondly—and she had laughed. It was terrible and cruel and she had whispered, almost too softly for anyone but Hermione to hear, "Crucio."

But the way Ron collapsed and writhed on the ground was unmistakable. His fit might've lasted ten seconds or a minute, for all Hermione knew, because the next thing she remembered was his body twitching once, twice. And then going so terribly still.

Then someone had grabbed her from behind and she was dragged into the melee, kicking and screaming until the Death Eater jabbed his wand into her skull and muttered "Stupefy." She woke up in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor an indeterminate length of time later, chained to the wall like it was the bloody Dark Ages again. She supposed she should be glad that she still had clothes on, but then Antonin Dolohov had emerged from the darkness and her blood ran cold.

Down there, in the dark, Hermione had learned many things.

First, that straining against her shackles only rubbed her wrists raw. No matter how much pain she was in, she tried her hardest to stay still.

Second, that Dolohov was a sadist who preferred brute-force Legilimency than any other kind of torture.

Third, that there was no limit to the amount of pain she could feel while trapped inside her own mind, because she could never pass out. And she couldn't die, either.

Fourth, there was no way out of her mind. The Longbottoms had been lucky, Hermione remembered thinking, because eventually their brains had essentially turned off. Physical pain could do that to a person.

Mental pain, no matter how much she wished it, could not.

Dolohov came down once a day. Sometimes he was happy and sadistic, sometimes he was melancholy and sadistic, and sometimes—and those were the worst days—angry and sadistic. For whatever reason, the Dark Lord had given her over to him as a chew toy. And it hadn't escaped her notice that now she referred to the man as the Dark Lord, like the rest of his servants, because uttering Voldemort within the Manor was just plain suicidal.

Out of the darkness and into the light, Hermione thought, because now her mind liked metaphors much better than straight facts and hard logic. Dolohov hadn't destroyed it, no. He had _rewired_ it, and that was the worst part. She could not think in rows anymore. Her neat lists and boxes hovered, sometimes just tantalizingly out of reach, because now her mind liked to meander from thought to thought. _Rigid_. Ron might've called her that once, and she had bristled, ever predictably. The adjective had never applied to her less.

Before Dolohov's daily visit, something like two months into her torture, she had hung from the bloody chains around her wrist that attached her to the wall with the sort of despondency that said she was very near breaking.

The steps coming down the stairs hadn't been the heavy, tramping footfalls of her least favorite Death Eater. They had been light, hesitant, and not at all sure of themselves. Hermione had raised her head, ignoring the ache in her shoulders, and tried to reorganize her thoughts because they were spread out so far that she had trouble reeling them back in.

The second thing she had noticed, besides the different footsteps, was the hair. That unmistakable Malfoy hair, a near-translucent blonde, shone dully in what little firelight made its way into her personal circle of hell. "What the _fuck,_ " she spat, surprised at the vitriol in her own voice, creaky and gravelly from screaming, "are you doing here?"

She remembered Malfoy flinching back from her anger instead of getting annoyed, and how that had surprised her. Little could surprise her in the darkness, she had thought, but she had been wrong, because Malfoy surprised her yet again. He pulled out his wand with shaking fingers, and Hermione had readied herself for another bout of pain. Mental, physical, it didn't matter to her. Bellatrix had already bounced down the stairs to carve "Mudblood" into her arm, and the damn thing was still weeping blood. She figured they had let Malfoy down here to deliver the killing blow.

Instead, he had murmured "Ferula" to wrap bandages around her forearm and a quick incantation to break the wards on the shackles. Then he had unlocked them with a quick unlocking charm—and that had brought tears to Hermione's eyes as she remembered what, exactly, she had first done that with charm—and she had fallen to the ground like a rag doll.

"Shit," Malfoy said, and stepped closer. "Didn't mean to—"

"Drop me?" Hermione said, and the side of her mouth crept up involuntarily. "Bold of you to assume—" she coughed, and her chest hurt from it. "Bold of you to assume that I could stand."

Malfoy muttered a diagnostic spell and paled even further from what Hermione assumed was an already unhealthy pallor. "That's not a normal cough," he said.

"Go figure," Hermione said, and spat blood onto the stones of the dungeon floor. "What are you doing?"

"Getting you out," he said, shaky but resolute, and that conviction warmed her somewhat because it reminded her of the way Harry and Ron had been. "It's not going to work," she replied, wiping at her mouth then. "The wards are keyed not only to keep intruders out, but to keep people in."

She glanced up at him for the first time since he had crept down the stairs and he took a step back looking almost frightened. Of her? A prisoner, limp and boneless on the floor?

 _Pathetic._

"I'm not keyed into the wards," she said quietly. "I'm never getting out of here alive."

Then Malfoy's face had set into a queer mix of obstinacy and determination. "No, but we can make it look like you did."

Hermione perked up at that, meandering thoughts dragging back together at this semblance of a plan, at this spark of hope.

Malfoy had dragged her up to his quarters in an agonizing start-stop journey from the lowest recesses of the Manor through hallways and storage closets and forgotten stairways, up from hell and into the light. It hadn't been Albus Dumbledore who had saved her, she thought bitterly. It had been the person she least expected to have the courage.

He had taken her to his room and laid her on his bed, then, flipping distractedly through a medical textbook normally given to Healer trainees, had done his best to mend her physical wounds. The curse scar on her arm he could only keep bandaged, and he had no idea how to fix the gaping holes in her psyche.

"I could try—" he had offered, and she had scoffed. "Give me the book," she all but ordered, and he silently passed it to her. She held her hand out for his want and reluctantly, the Malfoy heir handed it over. Hermione inhaled, muttered a diagnostic, and tried to read the quickly flashing words and numbers. It was no use. Her eyes couldn't stay focused long enough for her to understand any of what the diagnostic was telling her.

"Damn it," she swore, and passed the medical textbook to her unexpected ally. At his questioning look, she sighed. "I can't read it," she muttered, "the numbers go too fast."

"What did he do to you?" Malfoy asked, apprehensively.

Hermione fixed him with a steady gaze and didn't reply, watching as he gulped. "He ripped my mind apart," she told him matter-of-factly. "He ripped it apart and sewed it back together along entirely different seams. I'm not the Hermione Granger you knew, Malfoy."

He had surveyed her, those gray, cloudless eyes fixed on her face. "No," he agreed, "you're not."

And somehow the tentative friendship that formed when he had dragged her, quite literally, out of his basement, led to him caring for her as she recovered. The next day, Malfoy came into his room looking especially shaken. "Dolohov threw a temper tantrum when he realized you were gone."

"So they're looking for me, then?" Hermione asked, and realized she was beyond caring what happened to her.

"No," he said. "I Imperiused Jugson into admitting that he took a turn at you and that your body couldn't hold up under the stress. He dumped your body on the Manor grounds."

Hermione didn't even twitch at the mention of an Unforgivable. "I assume a Transfigured body double was found near the wardline?"

Malfoy had smiled at her, a dry, wry twist of his lips, but a smile nonetheless. "Dolohov and Jugson had it out right there in the dining room, throwing curses left and right until…"

He gulped, then continued. "Until my father stepped in and separated the two. Jugson had to promise to bring in two Muggle toys to replace you."

Once upon a time, Hermione would've cared that two Muggles were to be tortured in her place. But she was just so relieved that maybe she could have relative peace, at least for a little while, that she couldn't bring herself to feel sorrow.

 _Does that make me a terrible person?_ she wondered absentmindedly, then realized she didn't care about that either.

She spent most of her time under Disillusionment, down in the Manor's library. It was quiet there, but brightly lit, so that the shadows that haunted her dreams couldn't touch her, encircled as she was in the barrier of light. Nobody ever went inside. It was locked by Family Magic of some sort that was accessible only by direct heirs of the Malfoy line. Malfoy's father had sealed it for some reason, and he had managed to open a hole in the wards as the heir for her. It was there, in the silence and the light and the books, that she and Draco spent hours of their time looking for either a way to sneak through the wards. Or kill Lord Voldemort, though at this point it seemed merely like a pipe dream.

…

Hermione was currently hiding in Draco's closet, not knowing how he would react to her presence before he put the memories back. He had just entered the room, trudging across it with his back bent and his chin drooping to his chest. He was waif-like in the faint sunlight coming in through the window.

He stopped abruptly at his bed, spotting the full, corked vials and the note penned in his own shaky handwriting.

Hermione counted a full three minutes before he drew his wand, uncorked the bottle, and started feeding the memories into his own head. With each memory he put back, his movements became sharper, more desperate, until he was effectively shoving the memories in. when the last vial clinked to the ground, he whipped around. "Hermione?" he asked, his voice broken but so full of hope.

With a deep, steadying breath, she stepped out of his closet. "Here, Draco," she murmured.

Draco turned to her, a heartbreaking expression on his face. "You're okay," he whispered, and strode to her. "You're okay."

The devastating relief in his voice gave her pause. She hadn't thought he had cared so much until he wrapped his arms around her, both of them thin and trembling children.

"You're okay," he repeated into her hair, and his arms tightened around her. Tentatively, Hermione wrapped her own arms around him , face pressed into his chest. "As much as I can be," she replied dryly.

He pushed her back slightly, scanning her face with a hungry desperation. "God," he murmured, and she couldn't tell if it was in prayer or in exultation, and when he kissed her it was the third time Draco Malfoy had surprised her.

It wasn't love.

No, the feeling that bloomed in her chest when she was in his arms was not love, because all of her books told her that love was something soaring, something beautiful and free and untouched by the problems of men. It wasn't butterflies in her stomach or blood rushing to her cheeks, or tentative smiles and easy comfort.

It was something darker, something edged with desperation and obsession and frustration all tied into a pretty package.

She did not love Draco Malfoy, of that she was sure the way she was not sure about anything else anymore.

No, that was a lie. She knew that she did not love Draco Malfoy, and that we was sure of, but she was also sure of the fact that she hated Albus Dumbledore. Which, she could admit readily enough, was due to Draco's stories and also from her own experiences. They called Albus Dumbledore the Leader of the Light, after all, the man to lead them all out of the darkness. And he had led them all astray, hadn't he?

She pushed away her bitter thoughts and tried to focus on Draco. _We'll get out of this_ , she promised herself silently, promised the both of them. _We'll get out of this alive._

And sometimes Hermione wondered if the not-love she felt for Draco Malfoy would've been possible with her old mind, the one that was rational and chose the best path when weighing it against the others. Not-loving Draco Malfoy was dreadfully inconvenient. In fact, connections of any kind were dreadfully inconvenient, because if Hermione was ever to escape the hell of Malfoy Manor, she could not afford to care about other people along the way.

But he had saved her, she reminded herself, and that should count for something.

Hermione let her thoughts scatter like wild horses, then, and let herself stop thinking for a little while.

 **A/N Virtual cookies to whoever spotted all the literary allusions! The part about the world beginning with a bang is from T. S. Elliot's poem "The Hollow Men", the Word is from the Chronicles of Narnia (specifically,** _ **The Magician's Nephew**_ **, which is either the first or sixth book in the series, depending on how you look at it), 42 is, of course, from** _ **The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy**_ **, and the sugar bowl is from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don't have a beta, so please feel free to point out my grammar mistakes!**


	8. Luna Lovegood's Curiosity

Luna Lovegood's Curiosity

Luna Lovegood knew she was insane, and she didn't much mind it. It must be dreadfully boring to be something as common as sane, she thought, before considering that perhaps everyone was at least a little bit insane and in that case, she was both boring and unoriginal. Though the thought disturbed her slightly, she let it linger with her other thoughts, all corralled into a menagerie-like setting in her mind. What nobody realized about Luna was that she was a really quite accomplished Occlumens, because nobody ever bothered to read Loony's mind. It was a good thing that they didn't. Luna's creatures would eat them alive.

But then Luna wondered at the ridiculous notion of a mind eating another mind—what would it even feel like?—and then wondered if it was really ridiculous at all, because if people could eat other animals then why shouldn't minds be able to eat other minds?

Because minds don't have mouths or stomachs to eat with, said one of her thought-creatures, which sounded rather a lot like Hermione.

That's ridiculous, Luna argued. My mind could have a mouth and stomach if I wanted it to.

You're the exception, said the Hermione-thought-creature, fondly and exasperatedly at the same time.

Quite, Luna agreed, before wandering down the sunny paths of her mind and out, to the so-called real world. But if asked, Luna would always argue that her mindscape was just as real as the world outside it, because if she could see it and feel it and live it, it must be real. Otherwise, there would be the distinctly frightening possibility that nothing was real.

Was it that frightening, though, to be nothing but a delusion? The delusion in the mind of a god?

That sounded rather poetic, Luna decided, though it sparked a whole host of questions about if reality was one enormous delusion or a whole group of delusions.

A gaggle of delusions, so to speak.

Luna giggled at the image of Ron Weasley, but goose-shaped.

But she was getting sidetracked. Didn't she have a job to do? Yes, that's right. Professor Dumbledore had pulled her aside that morning and informed her of a curious situation. Apparently, a ritual had gone wrong. Luna could sympathize, as her mother had been killed by a spell creation ritual backfiring on the caster. Something to do with a hormonal imbalance causing her mother's calculations to be slightly off, which Luna thought about as little as possible.

But anyway, this particular ritual hadn't killed anybody, though she had seen George Weasley storming up the castle stairs with murder in his eyes. It wasn't a nice look on him. George looked much better when he was smiling or laughing, so his stormy expression made something inside of Luna twitch. In recognition or fear, she couldn't tell yet.

No, the ritual had brought people back. Harry, and Hermione and Ron too, plus a man that Dumbledore called "Professor Riddle". He had smiled at her when he spoke of the professor, but something in that smile was lying.

Professor Dumbledore didn't like this "Professor Riddle", of that, Luna was sure. And these people weren't their Harry and Hermione and Ron, they were someone else's Harry and Hermione and Ron. That was the part she objected to, really. Because she was mostly sure that they hadn't asked if the dimension travelers had wanted to come to their dimension—really, who in their right mind would want to, though the phrase "right mind" made her giggle (was there ever one state of mind that was right?)—or if the people left behind were okay with them leaving.

Professor Dumbledore, however, hadn't seemed to care when she warned of Finkelfyres. Nobody ever cared when she warned them, no matter how right she turned out to be in the end.

She distinctly remembered saying "Headmaster, do beware of Finkelfyres. They tend to become agitated when their precious people are stolen from them, and they cause aggression in their hosts."

With a twinkly-eyed smile and a wave of a knobby hand, Dumbledore had dismissed her. Luna pouted. She had been extra clear with that one, too, nothing convoluted about it.

Riddle. Like Tom Riddle?

But the headmaster had given her a task, hadn't he? Yes, he had. He wanted her to befriend them, give them a reason to stay. Of course, the second part had gone unsaid, as well as the "give them a reason to fight for us" part, but Luna understood well enough. She was young, not naive. There was a huge difference.

So that was why she was currently descending the stairs to the Great Hall, looking for a distinctive head of red hair. It must be consistent across dimensions, Luna knew, because then nothing would be consistent at all and they should just throw their hands up in defeat at that point.

Throw their hands up, Luna thought, and giggled. The image of Ron vomiting hands instead of slugs was a grotesque one, but amusing all the same.

She finally spotted the trio of students, sans their mysterious professor, sitting at the very end of the Slytherin table. The choice made sense, considering it was the emptiest. She only noticed them because they were under glamours.

The Lovegoods, after all, were historically very good at crafting illusions and therefore had to be very good at seeing through them. Xenophilius was no exception, and her mother, Pandora, had a latent talent for prophecy. Luna supposed the two gifts together made for a queer mind indeed, but she didn't mind.

So when she noticed the telltale aura of magic surrounding three nondescript, utterly forgettable—though not to Luna, as she forgot no one—students sitting at the end of the Slytherin table, as far away from Daphne Greengrass and Pansy Parkinson as possible, she meandered over and sat next to what must have been Ron. His table manners, after all, were as atrocious as they ever were. "Hello," she said peacefully, and held back a laugh when Ron nearly spat out his food. "Luna," he replied, eyes wide. "Luna."

She tilted her head at him. What a strange reaction. "That's my name," she said, smiling, and turned to the other two. Harry was next to Ron and Hermione sat across from them, twirling a fork between her fingers.

"You cut your hair," Luna observed, staring at Hermione. The girl's hand immediately jumped to twiddle with the strands. "A while ago," said the Hermione who wasn't her Hermione, though the argument could be made that the only person Hermione belonged to was herself.

Harry's fists were clenched in his lap. "What are you doing here?" he asked, voice full of false cheer.

"Well," Luna said, "Professor Dumbledore sent me here to make friends. I think he wants you to stay here."

"And why would we?" Hermione asked tartly, letting her hand fall from her hair. "We were dragged here against our will and now we are being kept here, against our will?"

Luna only looked at her. The girl was stressed, she could see, in the tense lines of her shoulders and the hard shape of her mouth. Something had happened to her to make her someone vastly different from the Hermione she had known. As she wouldn't ever know by just staring at her, Luna did the reasonable thing and asked.

"What happened to you?" she wondered aloud, peering at the girl. Hermione bristled immediately, her spine stiffening and all expression sliding off her face. "None of your business, Lovegood," she snapped.

"'Mione," Ron tried, but Hermione rounded on him. "Not a word," hissed the Gryffindor, who stood up. "I'm going back to my room."

She stalked from the hall, temper pulled around her like a cloak. In that respect, the girl rather remained Luna of Sirius—just less "grief" and more "something to prove".

"Sorry about her," Ron said placatingly. Harry's jaw was tight as he downed a glass of pumpkin juice. Not with anger, but something else. It was fear, Luna realized after a moment of studying his face and posture. Fear, an entirely unfamiliar emotion on Harry's face, because Harry had always been one of the bravest people Luna had known.

"What are things like in your dimension?" Luna asked suddenly, ignoring the way Pansy Parkinson seemed to shift slightly in their direction. With her wand under the table, she whispered "Muffliato," and smiled slightly when Parkinson turned away in annoyance.

"Different," Ron goffered, and propped his chin nup on his hand. "So very different."

"How so?" Luna prodded, listening attentively.

"Harry's parents are alive, for one," Ron said, either uncaring or ignorant of the way Harry's face darkened. "And we never had a Voldemort. Grindelwald, yeah, but nothing about these Blood Wars."

Luna tilted her head, considering this information. "Does everyone from here exist in your dimension?" she asked, a theory forming in her mind.

Ron glanced around the Great Hall. "Mostly, yeah," he said, "though I haven't seen a Hermione here, or me."

They haven't told him, Luna realized suddenly. For some reason, the Order had told Ron of the death of Lily and James and their son, judging from how he hadn't brought up this dimension's Harry being conspicuously absent, but not of his own or Hermione's.

She debated over whether or not to tell him with a squirrel-shaped creature in her mind for a brief moment before deciding that if Professors Dumbledore hadn't told him, he probably had a good reason. "True," she said then. Which only served to support her theory.

Luna snapped her fingers. "Moaning Myrtle," she murmured.

"Who?" Harry asked.

"In the out-of-order girls' bathroom, is there a ghost?"

Harry raised an eyebrow and exchanged a look with Ron. Doubtlessly, they thought she was just as crazy as her counterpart in their dimension. Because of icourse they did. It wasn't their fault that their brains ran on linear courses and first impressions.

"No," Ron said slowly.

"Was Hagrid expelled?" Luna asked then.

"Who's that?" asked Ron.

Harry nudged his best friend then. "Isn't he helping Charlie out in Romania? He's a half-giant or something." Ron's face seemed to light up in recognition. "Yeah, Charlie mentioned him once. Is that who—?"

He trailed off, seeing the calculating look on Luna's face, so at odds with her usually dreamy expression.

There's a single point of departure, she thought. A single point where our timelines diverged, and it has to do with Tom Riddle—sometime before Hagrid's third year.

Because in their dimension, the Chamber of Secrets had never been opened. Luna wondered if there was a world in which their Harry hadn't taken the curse meant for Sirius, before pushing the thought away. Wishful thinking had its place, but not in the here and now.

Though perhaps the unicorn guarding the door to her mind would disagree.

"Nothing," Luna said aloud, vowing to tell Professor Dumbledore at her first opportunity. "And what about Hermione?" she asked.

Ron and Harry immediately adopted defensive postures. "What of her?" Ron asked. "You sound way too familiar with her for someone who doesn't have a Hermione in this dimension."

"We had a Hermione once," Luna replied, rapidly calculating that telling Ron about Hermione's death was worth figuring out what happened to her sometime-friend. "She died the same day our Harry did."

Harry let out a breath and ran his hand through his hair in a comfortingly familiar gesture. The strands stuck up in a ridiculous enough picture that Luna couldn't help but giggle, seeing the afterimage through the glamour.

"I'm not used to the idea of being dead," he admitted.

"None of us are," Luna said wryly, wondering if this admission might make Harry and Ron more likely to tell her things. Being so underhanded made her uncomfortable, but she really did want her friends back. She missed Harry. He had been the only person to look at her, really look at her in that peculiar, awkward way he had.

Ron, she supposed, had been alright. Even though he still called her Loony on occasions. And though Hermione had rarely believed her, and tolerated her animals with the sort of long-suffering exasperation you'd give a small child, she had still been a brilliant conversational partner.

"Hermione…" Ron trailed off, pok at his food. "She's going through a rough time."

"And it's not like she accepts help," Harry added sourly. "Won't even tell Ron what happened to make her all obsessed with dueling."

Luna nodded understandingly. "You know," she said, "the Harry of this dimension did that too. I think he was used to doing things on his own."

"Hermione's the same way," Ron agreed.

"She'll open up eventually," Luna replied, before shifting tack. "And this Professor Riddle of yours?"

"He's the defense teacher," Harry put in. "He's taught DADA forever, but you wouldn't know how old he was by looking for him. He's McGonagall's age."

Ron raised an eyebrow at his friend, temporarily taken aback. "Bloody hell," he said, "you're kidding?"

"Nope," Harry said, somewhat cheerfully. The fear lining his body had dropped always somewhat. "I'm really not."

Having not seen Professor Riddle, Luna didn't quite understand Ron's shock. "Is his first name Tom?" Luna asked.

"Yeah, actually," Harry replied. "Does he exist here, too?"

Luna tilted her head in response. "In a way," she said cryptically. "So there's no curse on the defense position, then."

"Curse?"

"We've never had a defense teacher last more than a year," Luna confirmed. "We've lost them to crippling amnesia, being fired, imprisonment for impersonation, and centaurs."

"Centaurs." Ron's voice was flat.

"Centaurs," she chirped. "Except she was horrible, and it was really Hermione's fault that she was attacked by centaurs, so nobody minded so much."

The awkward silence that permeated their section of the table made Luna smile. "I think the one before my first year died," she said offhandedly. "In fact, there was a rumor that Harry killed him. Except he was secretly half-Voldemort, so no one pressed any charges."

"I killed a defense teacher?" Harry asked faintly.

"You did," Luna replied seriously, "and I'm fairly sure the crippling amnesia was your fault too. He was trying to Obliviate you or something, but you got the spell to backfire."

She spared Harry's deteriorating suspension of belief for a moment before deciding to crush it altogether by saying that "And the firing of my second-year DADA teacher was your fault too, though since you caught a dangerous criminal in the process and the firing wasn't really in anyone's control you didn't feel too guilty. My third-year teacher was trying to kill you, like the half-Voldemort one, so his imprisonment was justified."

"You're starting to sound like the curse on the defense position is really just Harry," Ron laughed.

Luna considered this for a second. "You're not entirely wrong," she agreed, "because he attracts trouble like a magnet.

"Used to, at least."

And then they lapsed once more into pensive silence. "Is anything here the same?" Harry asked, sounding mildly desperate.

"Filch is still a mean old bastard," Luna supplied.

Ron snorted. "You're not so bad, Luna," he said, smiling at her.

"For someone who dragged us here across dimensions," Harry added. Luna smiled back at them. "To be fair, that wasn't me," she said. "I'm not technically a member of the Order. They don't accept the underage."

She turned serious for a moment, wondering how much information she was allowed to give them. "Not much here," she said finally, after a long pause, "can be trusted. The Order wants to bring Voldemort down at almost any cost, the rest of Britain is under his control, the ICW is going to maintain a non-involvement policy in our civil wars unless Voldemort extends his reach, and the people here are not the people you know back home."

Harry and Ron considered her. "I can see that last part," Harry said finally. "Because Daph looks like she wants to murder everyone in this room with her bare hands."

"Daph?" Luna asked.

"Daphne," Harry clarified, while Ron tacked on "Greengrass." Ron jabbed a finger in the Slytherin's direction. "She's Harry's girlfriend back home," he stage-whispered, and Harry turned bright red.

"You must miss her," Luna observed.

"Yeah," Harry mumbled. "I tried talking to her, 'cuz I totally forgot I was under a glamour, but she just looked at me like I was a piece of rubbish that grew legs."

"She's like that," Luna agreed. "Not many friends, even in Slytherin. I tried to talk to her once two years ago, but she didn't pay me much mind."

"That's the other thing," Ron said, frowning. "Why does everyone here hate Slytherins? Sure, they can be kinda entitled and most of their political families are conservative, but they're not evil or anything. But there are almost no Slytherin students here."

Luna regarded him with a serious expression. "In that, then, your dimension did things right."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"Voldemort was a Slytherin," Luna said. "And he got most of the conservative families to follow him. The Slytherins missing…" she let her gaze travel over the Great Hall meaningfully, "are probably with their Death Eater parents." This last she spat with more vitriol that she usually ever spoke with.

Harry looked at her with an uncharacteristically soft expression, one she hadn't seen on him before the DA. Before Cedric, really. "What did they do to you?" he asked.

"What they did to everybody," Luna said grimly. "They took away the people I loved."

Suddenly, she couldn't stand sitting here, with people who were her friends but at the same time, were completely different people. She stood up. "I'm sorry, but I have to go," she said. "The Nargles will take my things if I don't put in fresh radishes. I'll be in Ravenclaw Tower if you need me."

She left quickly without sparing the two of them a glance, practically speedwalking out of the Great Hall. Tower first, she told herself, then I go see the headmaster.

Little did she know that she wouldn't make it to the headmaster's office that day, for as soon as she closed the door to her dorm and sat on her bed, she would start crying and wouldn't stop until hours later.

 **A/N Yeah, I have no excuses. No references in this chapter, but it's extra long to try to make up for my absence. And yes, it's a bit dialogue heavy, but next chapter, the action finally starts. On an unrelated side note, has anyone watched Endgame? I cried. Twice. Please review!**

 **PS: Part of me wants to write either a time-travel Sakura-centric Naruto fic, but I also thing there aren't enough Villain!Deku/Villain!Class 1-A fics in the Boku no Hero Academia fandom. Which would you rather I start work on after I finish In Media Res? Poll up!**


	9. Mad-Eye's Observations

Mad Eye's Observations

A/N This chapter is dedicated to the Guest who gave me all those fic recs! I was running out of good ones to read, so thank you so much for both the feedback and the recs :) To answer their question, Hermione from two chapters ago is the Hermione from the current dimension—she was captured in the DoM and the Order thinks she's dead. The Death Eaters too, now that I think about it, since Draco faked her death. This chapter takes place right after Minerva's and before Luna's while Ron's from earlier takes place before they were summoned at all.

And in other news, since the timelines might have started to get confusing, I added a cheat sheet on our new website. aureliaandmidnight . weebly . com

Warnings for language—lots and lots of angery adults in this chapter.

The Harry Potter sitting across from him, entirely different but also painfully familiar, looked angry and confused—for good reason, he supposed.

The kid wasn't supposed to die, he thought, somewhat bitterly. He had been what, fifteen? Sixteen? Not even legally allowed to drink.

And he was dead, his body unrecoverable. But he was also sitting right in front of him, and damn if that wasn't one hell of a mindfuck.

"So, in summary," Harry said, twirling his wand between his fingers the way Lea Xia had tried to teach Moody during a particularly boring Herbology class. "This is a dimension where there's some crazy Dark Lord on the loose who managed to take over the entire country, and Hogwarts has turned into the HQ for some sort of resistance? Only, you're failing so miserably at being a resistance that you decided your only course of action was to summon a teenager from a different dimension to fight your war for you?"

Mad-Eye felt a now-familiar stab of guilt, because the kid was right—the old guard had failed, miserably, and they were forcing their burdens onto the next generation.

He surveyed the dimension travelers, using his eye only sparingly, having rushed to the Room as soon as Dumbledore's patronus had flashed into existence in front of him. Hermione Granger stood behind him, visibly guarding his back with eyes so hard and dark that Moody had to wonder what had happened to her, in their Voldemort-less world, to make her so jaded. Ronald Weasley, looking no different from his counterpart, stood beside Granger in a classic defensive formation with his wand in a textbook dueling grip. Riddle, on the other hand, remained out of formation. He stood some distance from his students looking almost obscenely relaxed.

Almost unconsciously, Mad-Eye began a threat assessment.

The Hermione he had known had been the inquisitive muggleborn that he had disliked for no other reason than that she was small and obviously unequipped to fight against Death Eaters. But she had been wicked smart, Moody remembered, and her specialty had been research and something about house elves.

This Granger had an adaptive dueling stance that she seemingly copied off of Riddle, who had stood the same way upon arriving, and was unknown to Moody. His protege, then? Mad-Eye marked her as a possible threat in a skirmish for both unpredictability and unknown level of fighting skill, presumably high.

Ron Weasley, on the other hand, was easy to read. Textbook stance, textbook grip, probably knew nothing more than basic offensive spells and defensive spells. He marked him as a lower priority than Hermione Granger, but he made sure to keep an eye on him. Mad-Eye hadn't lived this long by underestimating an opponent.

And Potter...

"My boy—" the headmaster tried, the twinkle in his eyes conspicuously absent as he settled in his chair, having exited the room for a scant two minutes after sending George to Madam Pomfrey. Moody had seen a flash of white-blond hair through the crack in the doorjamb but chosen, grudgingly, to discount it. Dumbledore knew what he was doing. Hopefully.

"Yeah, no," Harry said firmly. "I'm literally the least equipped person in this room to fight a bloody dark lord, thank you ever so much."

"You were the best at DADA in your year," George said quietly, (Moody noticed the way his hand spasmed around his wand) "You formed an army of students that could stand up to any non-Inner Circle Death Eaters. You've faced Voldemort and won."

Harry snorted derisively. "Allow me to introduce myself, since you seem to be under the impression that I'm someone entirely different. Hi, I'm Harry Potter. My parents are James and Lily Potter, my best friends are Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and my best class—" he paused for emphasis, "is Herbology. I apprenticed myself to Madam Pomfrey last year and am currently taking the advanced Healer track. The closest I've ever gotten to fighting a dark lord is in demonstration duels with Professor Riddle."

"Healer—" Professor McGonagall choked, and Remus put a hand on her shoulder. Moody remained where she was, watching the man Dumbledore had called Tom.

An unknown quantity, he thought, doing his best not to bristle. The man had an aura of self-assuredness and charisma that unconsciously had him leaning in his direction until he realized and snapped back to sitting ramrod straight.

"Which brings us to our main question," said the headmaster, shifting forward slightly. "How long has Tom been a teacher at Hogwarts?"

Riddle gave the man an odd look. "You mean to say I'm not one, here?"

Dumbledore only waited for an answer, steepling his fingers. Moody was cataloguing the man's body language, but he gave nothing away. Either he was a very experienced people-people watcher or he had a very good teacher, he concluded.

Riddle sighed. "Decades, Albus, decades. Galatea retired eight years after I graduated. Since I was her apprentice and was already making a name for myself in the academic world, you showed up on my doorstep with a contract and that ornery look you get when you want something. You ate my biscuits, drank my tea, and whinged about the dearth of lemon drops until I signed."

Professor McGonagall let out another choking noise, except this time, Moody thought it sounded a lot like a laugh.

Threat assessment, he reminded herself, and went back to studying Riddle. The name "Galatea Merrythought" rang a bell, if only faintly. The woman was a bit of a legend in the Creature division of the Ministry. It was said that in her prime, she could take down a fully-grown Nundu without backup. That woman had been a powerhouse, and when she retired from actively creature-hunting she went to work at Hogwarts as the DADA teacher.

That had been decades ago.

So he's old, Moody concluded with a snort. Older than me and, if he was Merrythought's apprentice, powerful. Apprentices almost always adapted their master's techniques to suit them, but the techniques were always somewhat linked.

Riddle might fight with a bastardized dueling style, Moody thought, and resolved to do some digging on Galatea Merrythought.

"I've been teaching ever since," Professor Riddle concluded, shrugging.

Dumbledore sat back in his chair and took off his half-moon spectacles. "There was no Voldemort equivalent in your time, I take it," he said heavily.

"Nope," Harry replied, popping the "p". Moody fought back a scowl.

"And your parents are alive, Mr. Potter?" McGonagall interjected.

"Very much alive," said Harry, and Moody let his glare subside slightly. Good. At least the kid hadn't grown up with his terrible aunt and uncle.

Dumbledore let out a large sigh. "It seems we have miscalculated."

Hermione let out a dry snort. "You could say that," she said, before flipping her wand over her fingers and slipping it up her sleeve. "I'm starving. Any food around here?"

"I'll take you guys to the Great Hall," not-Remus sighed, and pulled out his wand. Everyone in the room immediately stiffened. "Would you let me apply a glamour over you to look more nondescript? I'm afraid that you three are rather infamous here."

"If you don't mind," Professor Riddle said dryly, "I'd much rather do it myself."

Looking like he wanted to object, not-Remus nevertheless backed up a step and holstered his wand. "Much obliged," replied Riddle, and he swished his pale white wand over the heads of his students. Harry thought it felt a little bit like dust settling on his shoulders or tiny pieces of sand, utterly unlike the cracked-egg feeling of Disillusionment.

"Wait," Moody growled, feeling his paranoia tickling at him. "How are we so sure these guys are who they say they are? For all we know, they could be Death Eaters in disguise." Or something worse, he added silently.

Riddle had the gall to roll his eyes at him. "I swear upon my magic that my students and I are all who we claim to be," he said heavily, letting the feeling of something swirl in the room, then gestured at the three teenagers.

"Now, off with you," he murmured, smiling tightly. They trundled off down the stairs, the Granger girl visibly fingering her wand.

"Let's get down to business, shall we?" he asked then, sitting down in front of them. It looked like a war council, almost, or a tribunal, with the Order members present for the summoning arrayed in front of this one man.

"Let's," agreed Albus, and steepled his knobby fingers. "We need help," he said bluntly.

Riddle raised an eyebrow. "From a sixteen year old boy, not even having reached his majority? I fail to see how Mr. Potter will be of any help in your little rebellion." Riddle waved a hand dismissively before continuing, a wicked glint in his eye. "He just learned how to heal compound fractures just the other day, you know? Essential skills for stopping a Dark Lord. Oh, and I hear he'd memorized the entirety of 1000 Magical Herbs and Fungi, since Pomona and Poppy insisted."

Moody could see Albus gritting his teeth, and he couldn't blame the man. The dimension traveler was deliberately treading all over the headmaster's nerves.

"There was a prophecy," Albus said quietly.

"Oh?"

"About Harry."

"Do tell," Riddle said dryly, feigning disinterest. But Moody could see the tension in the lines of his body and he was sure that the werewolf next to him was picking up on Riddle's quickening heartbeat.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives," recited Dumbledore, without much ceremony.

"And are you so sure that your Harry fit the bill?" Riddle asked.

"His parents were approached by recruiters twice, and the third time, they faced Voldemort in open battle. Harry's birthday is the 31st of June. And he was marked by a scar when he was attacked by Voldemort," Dumbledore replied.

"Curious," Riddle mused, before his lips twisted into an approximation of a smile. "But you see, your plan has a very obvious hole in it."

"How so?" Albus asked, and Moody tried to ignore the creeping feeling of dread in his gut.

"Mr. Potter's parents have never defied this dark lord of yours, seeing as how he never existed. And he has never been marked," Riddle pointed out.

It was now Albus' turn to chuckle, though Moody could not ascertain the reason. "But he has," said the headmaster.

"How so?"

Albus only shrugged. "Tell me, has he ever been hurt in one of his demonstration duels with you?"

Riddle narrowed his eyes, thinking, before he came to the obvious conclusion the same time that Moody did.

"You're joking," said Riddle, suddenly going rigid with realization. "You're joking."

"I'm afraid I'm not," Dumbledore said quietly.

"Me?" Riddle demanded, standing up. "I'm the Dark Lord all of you are scared shitless of?" He flexed his left wrist and his wand shot into his hand. It was a familiar wand, the unsettling bone-white color seeming to shine in the low torchlight. "You all are insane," he bit out, when he saw that every single witch and wizard in that room had also shot to their feet and palmed their wands. Moody was scowling and cursing his traitorous heart for pounding faster. Albus hadn't told him that the man they had accidentally summoned was the Dark Lord of another dimension.

Damn it, Minerva, Mad-Eye thought, sparing her a glare.

"Let's all just calm down," Albus tried to say placatingly.

"Are you insane?" Mad-Eye spat, "We have Lord Voldemort in our midst and you're telling me to calm down?"

"I'm not Lord Voldemort!" Tom roared.

Sirius Black, with all of his gracelessly terrible timing, chose that moment to burst through the door. "Is anybody going to explain," he hissed, "Why my godson is sitting in the Great Hall with his two dead best friends? Bad enough you said you were summoning Harry—" here he choked slightly, "But the rest?!"

"Sirius," Albus tried, "Now is not the best time—"

"Fuck the best time!" Sirius yelled, then seemed to notice the unfamiliar figure among the Order. "Who're you?" he asked suspiciously.

Dumbledore sat back into his chair, scrubbing a hand over his face. Moody followed, but kept his wand. It was going to be a long night.

Suddenly, Albus stiffened. "Someone's attacking the wards," he whispered, horrified, and Moody revised his assessment. It was going to be a very long night.

"Emergency protocols," he barked, getting back to his feet. "Minerva, you corral the students. Slytherin dorms are the most easily defensible, get them there and I want them there yesterday. Tonks, Molly, you're on babysitting duty." He jerked his head towards Riddle. "At least one wand on him at all times, you hear me? Lupin, I want you waking up the castle's defenses. You know how, yeah? It's mandatory for any Hogwarts professor."

Lupin nodded, his face grim as he rushed out of the room. "Black, you're with me and Albus. We're going to see what all the fuss is about," Moody said, a slash of a smile on his face.

Moody gave one sharp nod. "Go, go, go!" he yelled. Everyone still in the room went for the door, except for Riddle.

"If this is your dark lord," Riddle said lowly, "You'll want my help."

Moody sneered. "Be glad you're even keeping your wand," he snapped, and rushed out with Albus and Black. His eye saw Riddle glaring after him, a cold and calculating look in his blue gaze, and Moody couldn't shake the feeling that things were about to go terribly, terribly wrong.

A/N So, I wrote a rant on how annoying canon HP fights are on the blog, please do check it out!

Edit 5/30/19: Minor changes to clarify some elements, as well as change George's location's to fix continuity issues with the next chapter. It's almost as if I'm writing entirely by the seat of my pants.

Oh, and from here on out, there will be instances of not-so-kid-friendly language as the war intensifies. Consider this a blanket warning.


	10. Hermione Granger's Rage

**Hermione Granger's Rage**

Hermione's feet had taken her all the way to Gryffindor tower as she fumed. How dare she? Hermione thought, her fists clenching unconsciously, How dare she ask me such things?

What had happened to her? Merlin, what a question. Life happened, she thought bitterly, and she faced the Fat Lady with a scowl on her face. "I don't know the password," she bit out, her shoulders stiff.

The Fat Lady glanced down to look at her and her face, painted though it was, seemed to drain of all color. "Hermione Granger," she whispered, a pudgy hand flying to her bosom, "They told me you died."

"Apparently I did," Hermione said, tilting her head. She hadn't known that portraits could see through glamours. Useful skill, that.

Without another word, the Fat Lady swung open. There was only one occupant of the common room which, thank Merlin and Morgana and their 343 disciples, was just as she remembered it. The hair color was also familiar, but Hermione was immediately on her guard. The redhead looked up, and brown eyes locked with brown.

"Who're you?" he asked suspiciously, and in response, she took out her wand. His eyes locked on the vinewood, and he immediately looked away. "Granger," he said gruffly.

"Which one are you?" Hermione asked, knowing full well "which one" he was and exactly how much that question would hurt him. Sure enough, the twin stiffened. "The unlucky one," he muttered.

"I'm sure Fred thinks that's him," Hermione said, her voice as dry as the desert.

George grit his teeth. "You're a right bitch, you know that?" he said, voice sharp.

"I'm aware," Hermione replied, and tilted her head. "Luna says I'm different from your Hermione."

The redhead glared at her. "Yeah, I can see why she'd think that." But then he looked her over, taking in the short hair, the twitchy fingers, and the sour look on her face, and realization dawned. "Any reason in particular why you're baiting me?" he asked nonchalantly.

It was Hermione's turn to stiffen defensively before she forced herself to relax, to look unconcerned. "I'm pissed and there's a shortage of targets," she said, "and if Professor Riddle never taught here, I doubt there's an official dueling room."

At the word duel, George got a flinty gleam in his eyes. "I haven't dueled in a while," he said leadingly.

"Do you have a room?" Hermione asked, unimpressed.

"I might," said George. "Think you can keep up? I've got years of experience on you."

"And Professor Riddle tutored me himself," she said dryly, "We'll see who comes out on top, yeah?"

George rose from the overstuffed couch slowly, then walked back towards the portrait hole. He gestured for Hermione to follow him, turning his back. There was what looked like dried blood in his hair, a slightly darker crimson than the strands.

"What did you do to your head?" she asked, unimpressed.

"I'm sure you saw," George replied. "Bashed it against the wall after losing a fight with the magical backlash of whatever spell the headmaster pulled out of his wrinkly—"

"I get the picture."

The redhead flashed her a disarmingly nice smile, strained as it was at the edges with stress and grief. "I'm still capable of dueling, so don't think of going easy on me," he said then.

"I wouldn't dream of it," Hermione purred, surprising herself. When had she last been able to just...relax in front of someone? To let herself banter with someone without fearing their judgement? Because she'd changed since she had first met the boys, and when she was feeling particularly self-pitying, she let herself acknowledge the fact that she was scared. Terrified, really, of their judgement. Of what they'd think of her now that she wasn't their precious bookworm anymore, because of course she still acted the part around them. She was starting to think, however, after one too many questioning glances, that she was starting to slip.

 _You're slipping,_ she thought to herself. Those two words were what always got her going. They made her do one last push-up, one last dueling routine, and study one more chapter when she was on the edge of exhaustion.

"That wasn't what got you so rattled, though," George pointed out, leading her out of the common room and into the stone corridor.

"Hmm?" she asked, snapping out of her thoughts.

"What Luna said. That's not all that got you rattled, right? What else did our resident barmy seer say to you?"

Hermione tried again to control her impulse to stiffen. "What makes you think she said something else?" she said neutrally, and concentrated on the sound her regulation shoes made on the floor. _Regulation_ , she thought bitterly. The word embodied all that she had been and all that she refused to be.

"I knew our Hermione," George said, looking back over his shoulder at her. "I didn't know her well, that dubious honor goes to others. But she'd always get this look in her eyes when someone said something that bothered her. Really bothered her, you know? And just being compared to someone who's basically a stranger to her wouldn't have been enough to unsettle her. I'm banking on you two being just similar enough."

Hermione snorted. "You're right," she admitted. "She said something else too."

George hummed, but didn't press further. The lack of questions, of prodding, unsettled her. It was the option to just change the subject or to walk in silence that ultimately made her open her mouth.

"She asked what had happened to me," Hermione admitted.

George kept walking. "I wonder," he said quietly, except the sound echoed off the walls, making it audible. "I wonder what peacetime did to you that wartime didn't do to our Hermione."

"What was she like?" she found herself asking, suddenly interested in the life of a girl she had never met and never would meet. Because here, she was dead. Here, she had been stupid enough, reckless enough, to get herself killed. It was a sobering thought.

"Like I said, I didn't know her that well," George shrugged. "But we were in the same house and she was best friends with…" he paused, briefly, before shrugging again. "She was...loud. Loud in all of her opinions and neurotic when she found something she was passionate about. Her fourth year, she founded something called S.P.E.W.. Something about helping house elves, I think? She'd tear strips right off you for making fun of the name, she was so invested. Made these little badges too."

Hermione snorted. "That's utterly ridiculous," she told him. "Did she honestly believe a project with an acronym like that would be taken at all seriously?"

"Yes," George said, and Hermione thought she saw a flicker of a smile over his drawn face. She had sped up to walk beside him without realizing.

"She was wicked smart though," the redhead continued. "Little rule-follower, too, but even she realized keeping...keeping her friends in line was largely impossible. I remember being told about an escapade in second year that had to do with Polyjuice, cats, and leaving Malfoy's minions tied up in a closet? It was all very hush-hush but I know she had something to do with it if it involved Polyjuice."

Hermione found herself chuckling despite herself. "She sounds like she was a lot of fun."

George let out a sigh. "If you weren't on the receiving ends of one of her tirades, sure," he told her. "R-Ron," he stumbled over the name, "swore that she once got so angry that her hair started sparking at the ends. And she punched Malfoy in the face once in third year."

"Draco Malfoy?" Hermione asked then, flabbergasted. "She punched Draco Malfoy in the face? Whatever for?"

George stopped, in the middle of the hallway, and goggled at her before wiping a hand over his face. "Please, please tell me that your world's Draco Malfoy is a bigoted little shit, because if he's some saint there my brain will turn to mush. Mush, Granger, mush."

"Certainly not a saint," Hermione snorted, "Because he's certainly got a massive ego. But he _is_ dating Hannah Abbott."

George actually tripped, stumbling slightly before righting himself quickly. "The Hufflepuff," he deadpanned. "The halfblood Hufflepuff."

"That's the one," Hermione agreed, injecting a modicum of cheer into her voice.

"I'm going to hex you," he growled. "I'm going to hex you so bad."

"Where?" Hermione asked, unimpressed as ever. _If he could trip over nothing_ , she thought to herself, _I can beat him easily, legal adult here or no_.

"Here," said George, a satisfied smile on his face, as he pulled open a door to what looked like an abandoned classroom. She followed him inside, curiosity piqued.

"Your dueling room, milady," the redhead drawled, sweeping an arm out. She eyes it curiously. The desks had been shoved to the side to make room for a large space in the center and there were damaged training dummies along the wall.

"Not bad," she observed, before flicking her wand to lock and ward the door, as well as add a silencing charm. "We don't want any interruptions," she added, seeing his raised eyebrow.

He nodded and strode to the other end of the admittedly spacious room, taking his own wand out of his holster. "Standard dueling rules?" he asked.

"Which convention?" she shot back, and his lips twitched. "Salem, to make things interesting."

Hermione nodded before conjuring a feather. "When it hits the ground," she said, and let a wild grin overtake her face. Dueling was the one place where she could be free, where there weren't any expectations but the ones she set for herself, and where there was no room for careful facades.

She saw George's eyes track the feather and she dropped into her modified dueling stance. She had never fought his counterpart in her dimension, so she had no idea how he would fight. Might as well let him have the first move, then.

Professor Riddle's voice echoed in her mind as the feather drifted to the ground. _"You will not win if you don't know how to effectively counter your opponent, Miss Granger. In fact, I suspect that you will lose rather painfully."_

She remembered asking him if there was a difference between not-winning and losing, but that had been a long conversation she did not have the time to relive, because the feather brushed the ground and exploded into light.

Hermione heard George curse as he shielded his eyes and let her grin widen, her own eyes shut tight as she ducked into a roll. She had estimated the distance to the desks when she walked in, and when she reached out with her left hand and felt cheap wood, she knew she had been right.

 _Rule number one: catch your opponent off guard,_ she thought gleefully.

With a quick movement, she Disillusioned herself and crouched, hoping that the multiple desk legs would obscure the watery edges of the spell. Her opponent was blinking and rubbing at his eyes with one hand, maintaining a shield charm with the other. "Where'd you go," he muttered.

"Vox fragmentum," she murmured, pointing her vinewood wand to her own throat. "Oh, here, there, everywhere," she said playfully, used to the way the spell distorted her voice until it could be coming from the left, the right, and anywhere in between. The spell worked to multiply the pitch and volume of her voice. It would be vastly more efficient to just scramble his inner ear because she only had one opponent, after all, but she didn't want to shoot spells at him just yet.

George's eyes narrowed. "Conspersa," he muttered, and a cloud of flour burst out of the tip of his wand. It was the same spell McGonagall had used earlier, Hermione realized, and grinned. Hidden as she was in the desks, it wouldn't catch her. But her position did impact her maneuverability, and she needed more time to observe him.

"Ventus," she said, her voice echoing. The flour all blew to the other side of the room.

Hermione made a slashing motion with her wand. "Did you know that airborne flour is highly explosive?" she asked, her tone conversational. George paled, as with a slashing motion, she simultaneously cancelled the voice-changing spell and send a wordless Incendio out of her wand and into the still-hanging cloud. It exploded into flames, the heat reaching Hermione even though she was all the way across the room.

She had to applaud his reflexes, however, as he quickly dove out of the way. Quick, she decided, and versed in typical dueling spells. With prank spells I haven't seen yet probably up his sleeves.

"You play dirty," he called, visibly sending more magic into his Protego. Hermione crept out from underneath the desks and made her way behind him on cat's feet.

"Salem convention, remember?" she whispered in his ear, before dodging the elbow to her ribs and backing up several steps. "Headwitch Mauritania practically endorsed tricky tactics in her speech."

"Glad to know you're a bookworm in every world," George quipped. "Ready to fight for real?"

Hermione cast a quick Augamenti to extinguish the last embers of the flour-fire, which had already nearly burned itself out from lack of fuel on the stone floor. "Sure," she said, and snapped off three spells in quick succession. Stupefy, Confundus, and a tripping hex for good measure. With the ease of long practice, she staggered her aim to increase the chance of one hitting if he dropped his shield. Unfortunately, his Protego held.

 _Relies on his shield charm,_ she noted.

George snorted derisively. "I can just stand here and hold my shield indefinitely," he pointed out.

"No, you can't," Hermione said cheerfully as her image blurred out of existence. From her actual position behind and to the left of her opponent, she dispelled her illusion. Professor Riddle, when he agreed to tutor her one on one, had emphasized that part of her dueling style.

"You're not going to be a heavy hitter," Riddle pointed out bluntly, "Not unless you put in far more work than your schedule allows to improve your stamina. No, if you really want to learn how to fight…"

"Yes?" Hermione asked eagerly.

"We're going to have to make sure you play dirty. None of those regulation," derision dripped from his voice, "dueling spells. I'm thinking illusionary spells to distract and confuse your opponents, give you time for your analytical mind to poke holes in their dueling style, and then some high-impact ones to take them out of commission once you have them on the defensive. Or, at least, have them think they're on the defensive."

She had worked on her illusionary spells and transfigurations until she could do them silently, and was working on doing them wandlessly too—but her illusions tended to look... _strange_...without a wand focusing her intent. So when she had dodged George's instinctive elbow to the ribs, she had thought, _ipse replicare_ , and watched her double skid out from behind him and back.

While George backed up from where her illusion had dispersed, eyes scanning the room warily, Hermione came up from behind and dug the tip of her wand into his throat. "Do you yield?" she asked.

George stiffened, before letting his shield flicker out of existence. "I yield," he sighed, and turned to face her. "How…?" he asked, looking utterly floored.

"My hologram trick can't cast," she told him, smiling slightly.

George's eyes narrowed. "So the fire—"

"Another illusion," she admitted, "Visual, and then an auditory one, plus an over-powered warming charm. And the three spells that 'hit' your shield? You never noticed that the reason it didn't take any energy out of you to hold your Protego was because nothing hit it at all."

George stared at her for a long moment before bursting out laughing. "I take back what I said earlier," he said, smiling for what must be the first time in a while. "You're not half bad, Granger."

"Thanks," she deadpanned, "Means a lot."

All in all, the fight had taken less than ten minutes. "Pretty good, for a fifth year," George teased. "You said Professor Riddle taught you?"

She nodded, and he raised his eyebrows. "That man must be a wicked duelist," he mused.

"One of the best," she confirmed. "Last I heard, he could go toe-to-toe to Dumbledore if the headmaster wasn't fighting to kill. And it's the headmaster, he's never fighting to kill."

The redhead made a sound of agreement. "Got it out of your system, then?" he asked, lapsing back into seriousness.

"Mostly," she said, shrugging, and George snorted. "Hey," he said suddenly. "While we're here, and you've taken that stick out of your arse—"

Hermione made an offended noise, but her defeated opponent waved his hand dismissively. "Admit it, you've relaxed some. Anyway, did you want to talk about it?"

Hermione was immediately on her guard. "Talk about what?" she asked suspiciously.

"What Luna said," George replied.

Hermione pressed her lips together. The answer was yes, but it was also no. She hadn't even told Ron what had happened, because she knew exactly what Luna was referring to. But she wanted desperately to talk about it, to have someone understand, even if it was this broken teenager in front of her who she had just trounced in a duel. Because Harry didn't. He couldn't, what with his basically built-in friend group carrying over from his parent's days, and the fact that Lily and James Potter would have never stood for their son being bullied.

Once, she had thought the same about her own parents.

Making a snap decision, she pressed her lips together and tossed her head. "Why not," she declared, and plopped onto a desk, all previous grace forgotten.

George settled next to her, holstering his wand.

"But first, privacy," she said firmly, and cast three more wards on the door. "Nobody's getting in here unless they're the second coming of Merlin himself, and what's said doesn't leave this room."

"Alright," George agreed easily.

Hermione let out a long sigh. "Easter hols, second year," she murmured, tapping nervously on the wooden desk. "My parents sent me a letter, saying they wanted me home…"

 _Hermione was excited. She was going home for Easter hols! Her parents has specifically told her that they didn't want her up at Hogwarts for the break. They wanted to spend it with her._

 _Well, they hadn't said the second bit, but it had been implied._

 _Also, she had gotten an O on her latest Transfiguration essay that she wanted to show them instead of writing it in a letter. She had fidgeted restlessly for the first hour of the train ride to London before drifting into an uneasy sleep on Ron's shoulder. She woke up to Harry's bright grin. "C'mon, 'Mione," her best friend said cheerfully, "We're here."_

 _Hermione jumped up from her seat, jolting an also-asleep Ron. "Whuzzappenin'," Ron said blearily, pushing himself into a more upright position._

 _"We're here!" Hermione said excitedly, before tugging her trunk down from the overhead compartment. It thumped to the ground and the little brunette frowned. She would have to reapply the featherweight charm next time she took the train, she realized. "I'll see you all in two weeks," she said to Harry and Ron, giving them both quick, enthusiastic hugs. "Don't forget to do your homework!"_

 _The twin groans behind her only made her smile as she dragged her trunk through the train and out onto the platform. Spotting a trolley, she hauled it on and walked briskly through the magical divide between wizarding King's Cross and the regular King's Cross. Her smile widened when she spotted a familiar head of brown hair._

 _Helen Granger, like Hermione, had brown hair in riotous curls that defied gravity and reason alike. She usually kept it in a high ponytail that, as she had confided to her daughter once, pulled her scalp sometimes and gave her headaches._

 _Dan Granger, on the other hand, was a balding man with close-cropped blonde hair. His smile was kind, as was his wife's, and they were both lovely people who had never taken a hand to her. They were just...distant, especially since Hermione had gotten her Hogwarts letter and they had to let go all their dreams of Harvard and Cambridge for her._

 _"Hermione," her mother greeted, and she barrelled into her mother for a hug. "Mum, Dad," she said, smiling so wide her cheeks hurt. "I've missed you."_

 _"We've missed you too," her father said, and took the trolley handlebar from her. "Come on, then, let's get you home."_

"That doesn't seem so bad," George said.

"It wasn't my parents," Hermione told him, "and it wasn't that day. It was the third day."

 _The first day had been...nice. Quiet, in the way Hogwarts rarely was, and distinctly mundane in the way Hogwarts never was._

 _Hermione hadn't minded, enjoyed it, even, but on the third day, she had started to get a little stir-crazy. So she went for a walk through her neighborhood, savoring the feeling of being home._

 _And then she passed the park._

 _"Bloody hell—is that—?"_

 _"No way, I thought she was at some boarding school for the rest of the know-it-alls?"_

 _"Only one way to find out, yeah? Oi, you! That you, Granger?"_

 _Hermione turned, her hand reflexively going for her wand. Then she remembered she didn't have it. Her parents had a strict no-wizarding policy in the house, which meant she kept her wand in a drawer in her desk with the rest of her magical textbooks. She hadn't thought to bring it with her when she went out._

"That was my first mistake," Hermione murmured to George, whose face had set in grim lines. Wizards and witches almost never left their wands at home. Their entire society was dependent on them, after all. But as a muggleborn with only two years of living in the magical world, second-year Hermione Granger wouldn't have the same instinctual need to keep her wand close.

 _Hermione turned around. "Amy," she replied, recognizing the girl. "Amy Townsend, was it?" Her face was unfortunately reminiscent of Millicent Bulstrode, who, though both nice and competent, had never been blessed with stunning looks._

 _"That's me," the girl sneered, before hopping off the park bench she had been perching on like a bird._

"A vulture," Hermione opined. "Amy was like a vulture."

George only listened silently, watching her face.

 _"Whatcha doing back here, Granger? Is your fancy boarding school not as good as you hoped?" Amy asked, sauntering over as best as a gangly fourteen-year-old girl could._

 _"Visiting for the holidays," Hermione said cautiously._

 _Amy snorted derisively. "'Course you are," she said, flipping her lank hair over one shoulder. "What do you even do at your fuddy-duddy school? Sit around doing fuddy-duddy maths with your fuddy-duddy friends?"_

 _Amy's entourage looked Hermione over, taking in her baggy grey sweater and ratty sneakers. "Do you even have friends?" one of them asked, clearly skeptical._

 _"I do," Hermione snapped, straightening. "I do have friends, and they're very nice and smart, and I learn all sorts of interesting things at school."_

 _"Yeah?" another of Amy's friends asked. "Like what?"_

 _Hermione took an unconscious step back, remembering the Statute of Secrecy, and clenched her jaw. "Awwww, Beaverface, you shouldn't do that," Amy cooed. "Telling lies makes your nose get longer, remember? Your face is ugly enough. You don't need to make it worse."_

 _Hermione's anger was rising, hot and tight in her gut. Amy had always been snarky and sarcastic, but...before she had left, she had been one of Hermione's acquaintances. She had never said cruel things to her face, at least, though because she was two years ahead of Hermione, there had always been a distance between them. Advanced as she was and with Amy in remedial courses, the two of them had several classes together._

George was regarding her with a sympathetic look. He knew where this story was going. Hermione was twisting her shirt hem in her hands, but she couldn't stop the story now.

 _"I bet," Amy said, tapping a finger to her chin, "that you're not even going to a school for smart kids at all. You probably just transferred because nobody liked you."_

 _"That's not true!" Hermione protested._

 _"The second part is," one of Amy's friends piped up. He was pretty, Hermione decided, but the sneer on his lips was anything but._

 _Hermione backed up a step as Amy advanced closer. "You know what, Granger?" Amy hissed, low but loudly enough that her friends could hear. "You know what I think?"_

 _The brunette swallowed hard. "What," she said, trying to sound dismissive, but instead she sounded nervous._

 _"You're just a loser," Amy stage-whispered, as if telling a great secret. "A pathetic loser who makes stuff up about her school and has imaginary friends."_

 _Hermione snapped, and before she knew it, her fist crashed into Amy's face. The girl reeled back, her nose starting to bleed, and one of her friends caught her. "You bitch," Ami growled, and wiped savagely at the blood. "You're gonna pay for that."_

"She was right," Hermione said, not wanting to relive the beating that came after, and how she had lay on the pavement for a good ten minutes before dragging herself home. "I did pay for it."

"Merlin," George breathed, putting a tentative hand on her shoulder. "You were what, twelve?" Hermione nodded. "The worst part was," she said softly, all the fight drained out of her, "Was that I told my parents."

George's brows knit together. "What did they do?"

Hermione slammed a fist down on the desk next to her, startling George. "Nothing," she hissed. "Absolutely fucking nothing. Said I shouldn't have punched Amy in the first place."

"The bitch deserved it," George said, with surprising vitriol. "Picking on a little kid? That's just…" he exhaled sharply.

"I spent the rest of break holed up in my room, owl-ordering defense books. I thought, what if someone at school was like that? They could probably beat me with blindfolded. I never, ever wanted to be caught off guard again, especially not by a wizard." Hermione shrugged. "And when I got back to school, I went to Professor Riddle and begged him to teach me on the side."

"He said yes, just like that?"

Hermione snorted. "He made me work for it," she admitted, sighing. "Taught me one routine, told me I better have it perfect by next week or else he wouldn't deem me adequate to take on as his protege."

"Did you?"

"No," the brunette said, remembering all of his barbed comments about her form, her footwork, and everything from the angle of her feet to the position of her fingers on her wand. "But it was close enough. And now…" she waved her arm in a mockery of the gesture George had made earlier, "Here I am."

"Here you are," he agreed, somewhat enigmatically. "I'm glad you told me."

"I'm glad, too," she said. She then took out her wand and dismantled the wards before opening the doors. "Shall we make our way back?" she asked, feeling...lighter, somehow.

George nodded. "Gryffindor Tower awaits," he said, letting a half-smile tug at his mouth.

When they got back to the Fat Lady, she swung open without a word. "Where were you?" Harry (glamoured) burst out.

"Dueling," Hermione said, glancing somewhat guiltily at George, who was stone-faced once more. "Castle's on lockdown," Ron (also glamoured) said grimly.

"Why?" Hermione asked, caught off guard.

"Someone attacked the wards," a prefect standing by the fireplace called. "Might as well make yourself comfortable. We'll be here until the problem is dealt with."

"I should be out there," George muttered.

"Go," Hermione said, and, seeing his indecision, let her own mouth twist into a half-smile. "You're probably needed."

With a nod and one final concerned look, George left through the portrait hole and Hermione sat beside her friends, calling up her friendliest facade.

"So," she said, "What'd I miss?"

"Not much," Harry said, shrugging. "We got crammed in here with everyone else." Ron nodded in agreement.

With unease roiling in her stomach, Hermione watched the flames. "On the day we get here, too," she murmured.

 **Omake: Stupid Harry Potter jokes**

Draco was giggling to himself in the very back of the Hogwarts library. Concerned, his friend Theodore Nott walked over and sat down. "Drake…?" Theo said cautiously, "You alright, mate?"

Draco just kept giggling.

"Something funny?"

"Your name," Draco gasped, "Everyone's names!"

"Draco, have you been snorting Peruvian Darkness Powder again? You don't know what the Weasley twins even put in that…"

"No, no, hear me out," the blonde said, sitting straight up. He grinned, a thoroughly disquieting expression on his normally pinched and frowning face. "Theodore Nott?" he asked, and began to cackle "More like Theodore THOT!"

Theo, aghast, looked away from his cackling friend. He caught Crabbe's eye as the boy hid behind a bookshelf. "He's been giggling to himself for thirty minutes," the normally taciturn minion said, "I think you set him off again."

In the quiet of the library, Theo could make out the quiet thumps of a skull against a bookcase.

"Goyle's been doing that for the last fifteen," Crabbe whispered.

"Oi, Theo," Draco said, sniffling as he tried to hold in his laughter. "So, there's that meme, right?"

 _Meme?_ Theo mouthed at Crabbe, who only shrugged his massive shoulders. He turned his attention back to Draco. "Meme," the blonde said impatiently. "The 'hiss hiss, I'm a snake' meme?"

"Sure…?" Theo replied.

"Okay, but...Professor Snape."

Theo looked at him blankly.

"Snip snip, I'm a Snape," Draco said, making a scissor motion with his right hand, and began to cackle anew.

 **A/N Non-canon spells (I made them up using English to Latin on Google Translate):**

 **Vox fragmentum: fragment voice**

 **Conspersa: flour**

 **Ipse replicare: replicate myself**

 **343 disicples—7 to the power of 3, both extremely magically significant numbers.**

 **Salem Convention—I wrote some backstory on the blog.**

 **Genjustu Hermione, anyone? Naruto fans will recognize that my writing here is heavily inspired by the anime, but adapted to the constraints of HP, and consequently Hermione here is rather reminiscent of some fanon characterizations of Sakura. Just as another nod, Hermione's tormentor has the same first name as Sakura's when she was younger and bullied for her forehead. Dimension B!Hermione and fanon!Sakura are honestly just similar enough that I couldn't resist.**

 **Also, I basically wrote this giant chapter in one night, because, unlike the last chapter, this one came really easily. Please review if you find errors or if you have suggestions for improving my fight scenes—I'm working on making them more interesting—actually, just please review in general. They honestly make my day. Er, night.**

 **And school is finally over, so I'll have more writing time!**

 **#nobetawedielikemen**

 **Edit: Fixed some typos, changed Ami to Amy (because Amy does flow better in an English setting, thank you Guest!), and added an omake.**

 **Edit Edit: FFNET DECIDED TO REMOVE ALL OF MY FORMATTING, SO I HAD TO FIX THAT. *tears hear out in frustration***


	11. Theodore Nott's Reluctance

**Theodore Nott's Reluctance**

 _Did he think of himself as a Death Eater?_

Yes, yes he did. Unfortunately.

 _Well, his father is a Death Eater._

Yes, he was. But it is possible, he'd say, voice dripping with disdain, that he could be different from his father. After all, if the crossing over of homologous chromosomes ensures genetic variation among offspring, it stands to reason that he _wouldn't_ be a carbon copy of Nott Sr.

 _But...Death Eater._

It's a name, he'd say. It's a title. The brand on his arm is a tattoo marking him as a member of one of the more exclusive clubs in Britain, a club he was also a part of. To his eternal shame.

 _It's also an ideology._

To which he would snort, and say that no, it's not. Death Eater-ism is not a thing. Blood purism, however, is.

 _And is he a blood purist?_

His father is.

 _Is_ he _a blood purist?_

No, he'd admit. No, he isn't. Which is why he considered himself to be different from his father. But he would never, ever admit this aloud. Not when Nott Sr. was a high-ranking member in the Dark Lord's inner circle.

 _So he doesn't take part in the torture and destruction his_ club—and here there is always a condescending edge— _initiates?_

Here, Theo paused. He would always pause when this question came up.

No, he'd answer. Because his father had never been a good father and Theo had always strongly suspected that he had killed his wife. But, glaringly obvious flaws aside, he had always tried to shelter him from the worst of what it meant to have the Dark Mark on his arm. And now it was on Theo's, burned into his skin with magical ink. There would be no laser treatment for that particular mistake and no way to ever get it off unless he flayed off his skin. But, knowing what he knew of the Dark Lord, he would likely have to cut off the entire arm to get the mark off.

Unless, of course, the Dark Lord had managed to burn the tattoo so deep that its tendrils reached his magical core, in which case he'd never get rid of it.

Another unfortunate aspect of his exclusive membership was that the Dark Lord was a military dictator in all but name. Joining the ranks, even as the son of a trusted advisor, meant he would be sent out on whatever ridiculous raid that struck his Lord's fancy.

Mentally, Theo corrected himself. Not his lord. His father's certainly, but never his.

Which was why he was crouched by the front gates of his former school. And wasn't that an amusing thought. He, who has always competed with Draco for the top spot in Slytherin house, was a high school drop out. Amusing and infuriating in equal measure, he decided.

The silver Death Eater— _or is it Knight of the Walpurgis now?_ Theo wondered, the pretentious titles grating on him—mask was hot and heavy on his face. The bloody thing was made of real silver for some unfathomable reason. And silver was the highest thermal conductor.

Why nobody had bothered innovating the masks to a comfortable degree was beyond. They were all magical, after all, so surely something could have been done.

"Wardbreakers," hissed the squad leader. "You know what to do. Just stir up enough of a fuss that Dumbledore and his cronies come to investigate."

"Chances are they'll only send out some weaklings to check," piped up one of the designated wardbreakers. Theo had no idea who they were and didn't much care.

"So we leave one alive to go crawling back to the old fool," said the squad leader. "Yes, sir," said the wardbreaker, who then turned his attention to the gates and began muttering to his partner. Theo caught something about matrices and foci and possibly something about a hippopotamus, but then again, Theo was sleep-deprived so that last bit may have been his ears playing tricks on him. Then the two Death Eaters pulled out their wands in tandem and began shooting spells at the gates. Theo tracked the impact sites. What looked like three standard conflagration curses hit the gates one after the other in a triangle formation, revealing the bright blue shimmer of a shield. "That was just a warm-up," said the second wardbreaker, and Theo could hear the smirk in her voice.

She rolled her wrist and began a series of intricate wand movements. Resolving to look for books on wards as soon as he got home— _if_ he got home—he tried to memorize the combination. Flick up, down, tight spiral anti-clockwise, then a jerk backwards, a wide slash from left hip to right shoulder, then a descending arc. Her partner was mirroring her movements, spiralling clockwise and slashing from his right hip upwards.

The two of them were murmuring something. A chant, maybe? Theo had heard of chants being used in foreign magic and even some older English rituals but he knew they had fallen out of use at least a century prior.

At the conclusion of…whatever they were doing, twin gouts of bright red light shot from their wands at the gates. Theo and the rest of the squad watched in amazement as a rip the side of his forearm seemed to open up in the blue shimmer, the two sides being pulled apart by the red light. With the hiss and crackle of impending magical backlash, the wardbreakers' spell winked out and the rip snapped shut.

"There," said the male wardbreaker, satisfaction evident even if he seemed wearier than before. "If the Dual Crimson technique won't get Dumbledore off his ass, nothing short of the second coming of Merlin will."

"Get to the back if you want to catch your breath," their squad leader told them. The two Death Eaters obeyed, trudging to the read of the squad. Theo caught the tail end of their conversation from his position in the middle of the pack.

"'M'tired," the female Death Eater muttered, leaning sneakily on her partner. "You've been slacking on your endurance training," the other replied, poking her in the side.

"Oi, knock it off," said one of the other squad members sternly. Theo started at the voice. Someone had thought it was a good idea to send Travers with them? The man barely had any brain cells left to rub together after he escaped Azakaban. Sure, the man had skill, but…

 _At least he isn't squad leader_ , Theo thought, glancing at the man in question. Judging by the very recognizable hair, his father's lord had sent along Lucius Malfoy to lead the assault.

As if it was really an assault, though.

Theo wasn't stupid. The members of his squad were almost all teens and young adults, Travers the marked exception. It wasn't an assault team, not if the Dark Lord genuinely cared about making a dent in Hogwarts' defenses. No, there was a secondary objective, one which required Death Eaters on Hogwarts grounds. Naturally, Voldemort had picked both expendable fighters and the ones most likely to garner sympathy or mercy from the Order.

Stupid. If Theo was loyal to anyone, it was Draco, Blaise, and Pansy. He would not leave them in the Dark Lord's clutches to save his own miserable skin.

"We've got company," said one of the Death Eaters sharply. Theo cast them a suspicious glance. Werewolf hearing, maybe?

A minute later, three figures came into view. Theo sucked in a breath. There was the distinctive white beard of his former headmaster and the lumbering gait of Mad-Eye Moody. And the third figure…well. Sirius Black, Azkaban escapee, strode beside the other two with the sort of scowl on his face that would make any child cry.

"Selwyn, Parkinson, you take the blood traitor. Travers, Nott, Johnson, you have Mad-Eye. Djels, Raleigh, we'll take Dumbledore," Malfoy said as the three approached.

"Lucius," said Dumbledore, as he stopped before the gates. His shoulders were slumped in exhaustion and the twinkle was absent from his blue eyes, Theo noted.

"Albus Dumbledore," replied his squad leader, "You are hereby ordered by the Minister of Magic to surrender Hogwarts."

"Ah, but has your Minister forgotten the Hogwarts charter?" he asked mildly, visibly palming his wand. "In times of civil unrest, Hogwarts stands as an independent entity."

"You forfeited your right to independence when you accepted Mudblood refugees," Malfoy growled.

"Suck it, Malfoy," Black sneered.

Theo ignored the posturing adults in favor of watching two Death Eaters concealing themselves in the shadows. _They're waiting for the gates to open,_ Theo realized grimly. _They're the ones with the extra objective._

"This does not need to turn violent," Dumbledore said tiredly, and Theo weighed their odds. Three of the Light's best fighters against a squad of 10 barely-trained Death Eaters and one Inner Circle member. Of those, two specialized in wardbreaking and were running low on power, two had a secondary objective that would likely remove them from the bulk of the fighting, and one of them was a mediocre loose cannon—who he happened to be grouped with.

Theo did not like those odds.

Nevertheless, he flicked his wrist and gripped his wand. "Onwards and upwards," he muttered.

"I disagree, Dumbledore," Malfoy said. "Do it." At that signal, the two wardbreakers began a low chant and another series of wand movements.

Malfoy snapped out what looked like a Protego Horribilis as Dumbledore's face turned ashen. "Et conteret!" the two wardbreakers yelled, and the gates snapped in half with a horrendous screech of metal and magic. "Fan out," Mafloy roared.

Travers barreled straight towards Moody, cackling as he went. With a muffled curse, Theo followed. He had never had much formal dueling training, but he knew enough about duels that tag-teaming an opponent required truth and practice. Travers and Theo had neither.

With a burst of inspiration, Theo started Transfiguring. It had always been his best class, and when he dropped out, he had been learning those nifty inanimate to animate Transfigurations that McGonagall so favored. "C'mon, c'mon," Theo muttered, narrowing his eyes as much as he dared in the darkness of the grounds. He had only managed to make two jackals out of earth when suddenly, Mad-Eye was upon him, sending curses with a fevered glint in his one real eye.

Theo jumped back while sending his constructs forward and immediately put up a Protego. _Should I put up a smokescreen?_ Theo wondered, before remembering that the ex-Auror's eye had x-ray vision.

But two could play at that game. He darted quickly behind Travers and took down his Protego. "Oculi augendae," he muttered, and put up his Protego immediately after. His eyes burned with the strain as his vision sharpened, lost focus, and sharpened again. He could feel his pupils dilating past where they would naturally. But at least now he could _see_.

Moody had dispatched of his jackals easily and was advancing on Travers, who was shooting off Killing Curses with more and more fervor. The ex-Auror just brought up shields of earth over and over again. "Expelliarmus," he said gruffly, not even bothering to raise his voice, and Travers' wand was flying through the air.

"Stupefy," Moody said then, and Travers dropped like a stone. "Incarcerous."

Theo stood, wand outstretched, trying desperately to keep his hand from shaking. His Protego was flickering.

 _I'm dead,_ Theo thought distantly. But he could not think logically past the adrenaline and the litany of _That's Moody, holy shit, Travers is down, do we even have back up, shit shit shit—_

"Take the mask off, boy," Moody said gruffly. With trembling fingers, Theo obeyed, and he let the ceramic drop to the ground. At least he could breathe now.

A strange expression crossed Moody's face then, and he visibly clenched his jaw.

With one last pathetic shimmer, Theo's shield charm dropped.

 _I'm dead_.

"Stupefy," said Moody, and with a flash of red light, Theo knew no more.

 _ **End of Part 1**_

 **Et conteret: and shatter**

 **oculi augendae: enhance eyes**

 **A/N Summer vacation is like...a writer's best friend.** **Yeah, this chapter was pretty short, but it's basically an interlude. The set-up/exposition is done and from here, the plot is going to split in three different directions. Which means more consistent POVs! Yay! Which means more action! Yay! Which means more angst! Yay…?**

 **BTW, thank you again for the recs, Guest :)**


	12. Hermione I

**Hermione I**

 _My name is Hermione Granger._

 _I am seventeen years old._

 _I am a muggleborn witch._

 _I hate Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore, but the latter slightly less so._

 _I trust Draco Malfoy._

She woke up each morning in Draco's bathroom (the last place they would think to look for her) pleasantly surprised to be alive. And every morning, as she went through the motions of groping for her wand and washing her face, she would remember her five truths. She knew her name, her age, what she was—Merlin, she would never, ever forget what she was, not when it was burned into her arm—who she hated, and who she trusted. And then she would repeat them until she felt they were burned into her brain.

Her thoughts were so fleeting nowadays, and so shrouded in uncertainty, that she felt she must hang onto the few things that she knew were unquestionably true.

 _My name is Hermione Granger._

 _I am seventeen years old._

 _I am a muggleborn witch._

 _I hate Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore, but the latter slightly less so._

 _I trust Draco Malfoy._

Her five truths were a strange bastardization of ritual affirmations and possibly brainwashing, but they kept her focused as she searched for a way out.

She had been inside Malfoy Manor for four months. For two of those, she had been down in the dungeons having her neurons rearranged. For one, she had regained her strength in Draco's care, which, if not skilled, had been earnest. And she had spent her last one observing the Death Eaters and writing down her scattered, jumbled thoughts.

Hermione knew their routines now. Dolohov, that piece of shit, spent a concerning amount of time inside the Manor. He ate breakfast at five in the morning, left until lunchtime, remained inside doing whatever psychopaths do for fun, and left on night raids at seven.

This was in stark contrast to Travers, who only came when Lord Voldemort called for a meeting. Bellatrix and her two pet Lestrange brothers were notably absent for the first half of every day and kept inside for the other half, haphazardly patrolling the hallways and making a mess for Lucius to clean up.

The senior Malfoy was almost always at the Ministry on business, while his wife kept to her chambers as often as she could. MacNair spent time at the Manor intermittently, and his schedule was perhaps the most chaotic. The others were predictable enough that Hermione had time to sneak into the dungeons or the library, and, once, the kitchens—always, _always_ , under heavy Disillusionment.

She had yet to find a way out, and expressed her frustrations to Draco often.

"I'm going to die here," she said once. She was sitting on top of his bed and trying to wrangle her hair into a ponytail. Draco stiffened. "We'll make it out," he said lowly, his fists clenching in his blankets.

"And if we don't?" she asked.

"We will," he promised, and there was such burning conviction there that a small part of he couldn't help but believe him.

"How?" she pressed nevertheless. "I've looked through every goddamn book your family owns on warding. There is no way I can leave without being keyed in, and your dad is the one with the wards tied to him with that stupid ring. And you've said it yourself, that ring's not coming off unless he pulls it off willingly. We can't exactly cut off his finger, no matter how tempted I am," she spat.

The Malfoy family ring was the biggest pain in the ass Hermione had encountered since she learned about the restriction on underage magic. With it, the wielder could control the wards around the Manor, which meant they could key people in and key people out. To get out at all, she would have to attack the wardstones somehow, and with wards as old as theirs, there wasn't even a guarantee that she could bring them down anyway.

"We just need that ring," he said, drumming his fingers on his thigh. "We had the two highest scores last year, we should be able to figure this out."

Hermione bristled. "I've told you," she said, clenching her jaw, "I'm not that girl anymore."

"You're still you," Draco pointed out, "just angrier and probably twice as dangerous."

Hermione shook her head. "But I'm not," she said. "I can't even remember facts from _Hogwarts: A History_ anymore. The knowledge is just…gone. Dolohov _ruined_ my near-eidetic memory and completely removed my ability to focus and I hate it, Merlin, I hate it so much—"

She realized, belatedly, that she had started hyperventilating.

Draco reached out a hesitant arm and draped it around her shoulders. "Breathe," he said softly. Hermione watched the fingers on his other hand begin to tap nervously on his knee. "Just breathe, Granger, breathe."

"Yeah," she gasped, "yeah."

She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, pressed into Draco's side and watching the fingers of his left hand tap.

"Five things," he muttered into her hair.

She took one controlled, deep breath, and began to list. "I see your fingers, the wood of that table, the drapery, your hair, and my socks. I can touch the bedsheets, the floor, my hair, and your skin. I hear…" she paused, because this was usually where it got tricky. "I hear my thoughts," she grumbled.

"Those don't count," Draco reminded her.

She took another breath. "I hear...the sound of your fingers on your pants, the creak of the floor, and the rustle of the bedsheets. I smell the Pepper-Up you keep in your drawer and the lavender your mother puts everywhere. And I taste the sandwich I had for lunch."

"There," Draco said softly. "You're alright."

"I'm not," she shot back instinctively.

"You're getting better," he corrected, and she relaxed. "Yeah," she agreed, and shelved the issue of the ring for the next day.

…

It just so happened that the solution for the ring, quite literally, fell into Draco's lap. The two of them were sharing a rare quiet moment in the library— _read: making out_ —when Hermione's back slammed into the bookcases a little too hard. A book perched on top of the shelf, positioned so neither of them would have noticed it otherwise, tumbled off the edge and smacked into the both of them.

Draco cursed and picked up the book. " _Bloodlines,_ " he read, eyes narrowing.

Hermione ran a hand through her disheveled hair and took the book from him, then flipped to the table of contents. A smile stretched across her face. "That's fortuitous," she muttered.

"Lucky," Draco agreed, as she flipped pages.

She scanned a passage, her smile growing. "I might just have a plan," she told him, and the hope in his eyes lit up his entire face.

…

The next week, they put their plan into motion. "We have everything?" Hermione asked, fingers pulling at her hair in a nervous tic she hadn't had since childhood.

Draco thought for a second, looking over the items on the bed. "Blood, key to the wardstone room, shovel, our notes, my mother's engagement ring—"

"Engagement ring?"

"I couldn't get her to part with her actual marriage ring. I nicked this from her jewelry box. She hasn't worn it in years, but it's a heirloom."

"Who did it belong to before her?" Hermione wondered.

Draco's slash of a grin warmed her as he replied, "Officially, it belonged to my grandmother. My grandfather, however, never told his son that he bought it from a muggle store originally and had it reworked by a wizarding jeweler."

Hermione threw her head back and laughed. It was a dry, raspy thing brought on by too many sleepless nights from nightmares, but a laugh nevertheless. Draco's expression seemed torn between something altogether too fond to be comfortable, and the same wicked glee reflected in her own. "This might just work," she said, digging her bitten nails into her palm.

"It just might." He swept their supplies into a worn bag. Hermione Disillusioned herself and Draco as she opened the door, but she had never wished so much for Harry's invisibility cloak.

But, not for the first time, did she wonder where it was. Harry hadn't brought it to the Battle, had he? Because if he had, it was lost in the Veil with him, and that was just a waste.

The two teenagers crept through the hallways of the Manor, sticking to the shadows clinging like some deadly miasma to the walls. According to Draco, this was a side effect of whatever the hell the Dark Lord was doing in his basement.

Unfortunately, the wardroom was also located in the basement, and any changes in the wards would immediately be felt by Draco's father if anyone went through them. "Magical resonance is a pain," Hermione remembered the blonde complaining, as he hunched over the floor plans of his own house and her scribbled notations of the Death Eaters' routines.

It was Wednesday. The Dark Lord spent Wednesday mornings at the Ministry, and Death Eater presence within the Manor were at their lowest just after breakfast. If they had to wait another week for their window of opportunity, the chances of the key to the wardroom being discovered as missing increased. And Hermione had snatched it off of one of the house elves, so she couldn't exactly _return_ it without being able to definitely get it back.

It was now or never.

They crept down the endless stairs of the Manor, descending into the darkness and into the heavy feeling of latent magic that only increased in density the closer to the Dark Lord's workplace one got. It pressed into Hermione, and the suffocating feeling of it only reminded her of her own stint in the dungeons.

Draco, noticing her tension, pressed a hand into her back. He didn't speak, knowing that any sound in here would echo, but the silent comfort calmed Hermione's ranging thoughts somewhat from a waterfall of tangling noise to something akin to a stream.

It seemed like forever before they arrived at the wardroom, the innocuous wooden door with a single keyhole melting out of the shadows.

Hermione raised her wand and shot off a ward probe she had found in Draco's library. The amount of feedback she got from the spell was staggering enough that she took a step back, breathed deeply, and gestured for the key. The door was wrapped in enough protective magic to stop a rampaging chimera from bashing down the wood, and the wall around it had strange trails of magic reinforcing the structure. Hell, that kind of protective magic, layers cast by each successive generation of Malfoys, could only be cut through by a key—which, thankfully, they had—or maybe a very, very intelligent wardbreaker.

She gestured for the key, which Malfoy handed to her, and, gingerly, opened the door.

Inside was the wardstone—a chunk of limestone three feet wide and two feet tall. Etched on its surface were hundreds of thousands of tiny, painstakingly etched runes, of which Hermione could only read a few.

"We have a ten minute window to get out of here, if this works. Dictionary?" she muttered, as Draco closed the door behind them. He dug around in their bag and pulled out a worn leather book. She took it from him carefully, and knelt by the stone. With shaky hands—something she had never needed to deal with before being captured, so her working theory was that Dolohov had misaligned some of the neurons in her motor cortex somehow—she flipped through the pages. "Are you drawing the circle?" she asked.

"Yeah," replied the blonde, who had chalk and a piece of string in his own, steadier hands. He was drawing out a ritual circle. Leaving spaces, he began to draw the anchor runes. Raidho, for focus. Naudhiz, to restrict the casting energy and to help with the initial tear they would make in the wards. Dagaz, for stability. And Fehu, a rune that described the movement of wealth. Draco had argued long and hard with Hermione about including Fehu at all, because he had always associated Fehu with actual money. Hermione hadn't budged. "I'm doing the actual casting," she told him, "and power is a kind of wealth the same way Galleons are." In the end, he had acquiesced, knowing that the Arithmancy supported the use of four anchor runes in a warding circle.

"Okay, I have the ones you need for the blanks," Hermione said, her finger moving quickly down the page she had opened to. "Isa, Tyr, Yr, and Thurs, going clockwise."

Draco nodded and began to draw the runes with the chalk.

"Ready?" Hermione asked a minute later, growing antsy.

"Yeah," the blonde replied, and dropped the ring into its spot in the circle. Hermione surveyed their work with a critical eye, nodded once, and stepped back. "Flood it."

Draco gripped his wand tightly in his right hand, placing the tip on Raidho. He pressed his left into the wardstone.

 _Please work,_ Hermione thought, _Please_.

Draco was visibly sweating as he pushed magic through the circle. The air was heavier, almost charged with static electricity, and Hermione found herself backed against the wall.

"Come on," he muttered, already pale face nearly chalk white from exertion. "Come _on._ "

With the feeling of a rubber band snapping, the latent magic in the air whipped once and disappeared, funnelled into the ring. Draco sat back on his heels, panting, and picked up the ring. Our ten minutes starts now," Hermione whispered.


	13. Hermione II

Hermione II

They had ten minutes to get out of the manor, and time was ticking. With excruciating slowness, the two teens crept through the hallways onto the second floor. The old servant passageways, back from when the Malfoys didn't have house elves and instead employed human servants, hid them from the Death Eaters scattered through the Manor.

The second floor, picked by Draco because of the relatively short drop to the ground and a window facing the back of the grounds, had never seemed further away. The _ratatata_ beat of Hermione's pulse echoed in her ears as they ascended. She didn't dare open her mouth, knowing that discovery at this critical point would mean the death of both of them. And she knew firsthand that their deaths wouldn't be at all quick.

They made it to the second floor without incident and Hermione let out a breath. Almost there. They could do this. Escape was so close that she could taste it on her tongue, as every part of her yearned to be free of this stuffy, deadly Manor.

But the door to Draco's room was ajar.

She had kept track of the time to try and calm her racing heart. _Five minutes and 34 seconds left but the door, the fucking door was open._

Hermione's eyes darted to the sliver of light between the door and the wall, teasing her, taunting her. Because that door hadn't been open when they had left. Hermione remembered with crystal clarity how she had tugged the slab of wood shut behind her. Someone was in their room, their room with empty memory vials and _shit her bedding was in there, how could they have been so careless_ , and books on warding and oh sweet Morgana and her unmerciful hounds. They were never going to get out.

She didn't notice how her breathing came quick and uneven until Draco put an arm around her waist and swore under his breath. "Not now, 'Mione," he murmured into her hair, his voice sharp and desperate. "Hold it together. We're almost there."

"The door," she breathed, "the _door_."

Draco glanced at the open room and his face, pale as it was from a lack of real sunlight, paled impossibly further. "Ignore it," he said, so quietly that he might as well have been mouthing the words.

Hermione nodded, trying to keep herself together. The knot of panic in her chest was expanding, threatening to seep into her limbs and still them. They couldn't afford this. Not now, when they were so damn close.

 _Stop it,_ she admonished herself, and the two of them made their way even more slowly to the window. _Two minutes and four seconds._

Draco eased the glass pane open. No time to get the rope they had stashed underneath Draco's bed, no time, no time, no _time—_

Excruciatingly slowly, they climbed out of the window and down the wall as far as the uneven bricks allowed them. When they were half-way down, they ran out of easily jutting-out footholds.

"Jump," he whispered, and Hermione jumped.

A dizzy split second later and she was on the ground rolling, pain jarring her knees and ankles but leaving her otherwise unharmed. A soft thump alerted her to Draco's landing behind her as they broke into a run, making for the wardline. It wasn't far, close enough to the back of the house that they would make it, they had to make it. "Thirty seconds!" Hermione called out, and the two of them went faster. Hermione was breathing harder than before but they were just so _close_.

The ring on Draco's hand was fizzing sparks now, burning his fingers but he held onto it and grabbed her hand. "Three, two," Hermione whispered, and then the two of them were _through_ , the wards brushing over her like a soft blanket in a haze of golden light.

A scream split the air behind them as the ring split in two. "They know," Draco said grimly.

"You ready?" Hermione asked, clutching his hand.

"As I'll ever be," Draco replied, and the two of them Apparated away with a _pop_.

 **A/N I'm sorry for how goddamn short this chapter is. I thought that the summer would make it easier to write—in fact, it made it more difficult. A case of writer's block and personal upheaval have delayed me from writing anything substantial, and for that I apologize. For those of you still reading, thank you for sticking by this story. It is the story I've wanted to write since I jumped headfirst into this fandom, and for that, it will not be abandoned no matter how long it takes for me to finish updates.**

 **This is the wrap up, essentially, of the previous chapter. It's short because I switch perspectives so often that I wanted to at least make sure the POV is constant in one chapter.**


	14. temporary note

It's hard to write about a war right now. This is just a temporary to say I don't know when my next update will be, or if there will _be_ a next update in any reasonable time frame. I do know I update sporadically at best, so I don't think it's too much of an issue. But...yeah. It's difficult to write about revolts and violence and revolution right now, even if the good guys are going to win in the end. I don't think I'd be able to maintain a healthy distance between myself and the story, you know? Anyway. I hope you all are staying safe and doing well.

Peace.

\- Aurelia


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